Sam doing a 180 on non-profit to for-profit was egregious, IMHO. Having said that, plenty of extremely profitable organizations masquerade (literally and figuratively) as non-profits.
Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
Edit: Plus it's still the case that OpenAI aren't putting profit above all else. E.g. they just released the ChatGPT API and it's 10x cheaper per token than GPT3! And their Charter does count for something, it's binding on them.
Not remotely an expert, this is just my basic understanding. "Nonprofit" is a pretty abused term.
Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.
I think you are confusing non-profit with charity perhaps?
As one example, the CEO of Kaiser was the highest paid nonprofit CEO at ~$18m[0] in 2021. That seems egregious until you realize Kaiser had $93b in revenue in 2021[1].
As one example from healthcare, the CEO of Moderna was paid $18m in 2021[2]. Moderna reported $18b in revenue in 2021[3].
You see this over and over in discussions about nonprofits, charities, etc. In most cases the executive leadership team is running a huge organization - in the case of Kaiser nearly $100b in revenue and 300k employees. Competent leadership at that scale is expensive.
In an ideal world this wouldn't be the case and individuals with these qualifications would be willing to take even more significant pay cuts for the "greater good" of whatever the mission of the nonprofit it. Per usual that's not the world we live in.
Speaking personally, I'd give pause to working with, donating to, etc an organization doing $100b in revenue with an executive team making 1/20 (or whatever) they would make elsewhere. In some limited cases for those who have "made their money" it would be a great thing. For anyone else I would assume they're either taking a HUGE pay cut for the cause (great thing, but unlikely) or completely incompetent, embezzling, etc.
[0] - https://www.erieri.com/blog/post/top-10-highest-paid-ceos-at...
[1] - https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/news/kaiser-foundation-he...
[2] - https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-lobbying/34...
[3] - https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2022/Moder....
Very easy to work around by outsourcing most operations. If you really want to prevent high salaries there you'd need to link it to some more fixed measure, such as a multiple of median salary.
Non-profit doesn’t mean the organization isn’t supposed to have surplus revenue, it means it doesn’t exist to return profits (e.g., via a claim on the assets of the company) to stockholders or some other beneficiary with a claim on them.
That's not a contradiction. A non-profit can be profitable. The profit just needs to be reinvested back into the mission of the organization.
A privately owned for-profit company can do whatever it wants, good or evil. OpenAI is not publicly-owned.
Did you donate money to OpenAI?
A nonprofit is an organization that uses its income and profits for the organization's main goal that supports the mission. On the other hand, a charity is a type of nonprofit that engages in activities aimed at improving lives in the communities.
NFL was a non-profit trade association until ignorant whiners made it bad PR and they changed it to shut up the whiners.
Isn't Ikea technically a non-profit? through some weird structuring?