Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.
It's better to claim your stake in a forthright way, than to have some kind of lucrative side deal, off the books.
For a non-profit, there was too much secrecy about the company structure (the shift to being closed rather than Open), the source of training data, and the financial arrangements with Microsoft. And a few years ago a whole bunch of employees left to start a different company/non-profit, etc.
It feels like a ton of stuff was simmering below the surface.
(I should add that I have no idea why someone who was wealthy before OpenAI would want to do such a thing, but it's the only reason I can imagine for this abrupt firing. There are staggering amounts of money at play, so there's room for portions of it to be un-noticed.)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificia...
But that $1 salary thing got quoted into a meme, and people didn't understand the true implication.
The idea is that employee and CEO incentives should be aligned -- they are part of a team. If Jobs actually had NO equity like Altman claims, then that wouldn't be the case! Which is why it's important for everyone to be clear about their stake.
It's definitely possible for CEOs to steal from employees. There are actually corporate raiders, and Jobs wasn't one of them.
(Of course he's no saint, and did a bunch of other sketchy things, like collusion to hold down employee salaries, and financial fraud:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/how-jobs-dodged-the-stock-optio...
The SEC's complaint focuses on the backdating of two large option grants, one of 4.8 million shares for Apple's executive team and the other of 7.5 million shares for Steve Jobs.)
I have no idea what happened in Altman's case. Now I think there may not be any smoking gun, but just an accumulation of all these "curious" and opaque decisions and outcomes. Basically a continuation of all the stuff that led a whole bunch of people to leave a few years ago.
I'm pretty sure that CEO salaries across the board means that CEO's are definitely — in their own way — "stealing" from the employees. Certainly one of those groups is over-compensated, and the other, in general, is not.
Apple was a declining company when Jobs came back the second time. He also managed to get the ENTIRE board fired, IIRC. He created a new board of his own choosing.
So in theory he could have raided the company for its assets, but that's obviously not what happened.
By taking $1 salary, he's saying that he intends to build the company's public value in the long term, not just take its remaining cash in the short term. That's not what happens at many declining companies. The new leaders don't always intend to turn the company around.
So in those cases I'd say the CEO is stealing from shareholders, and employees are often shareholders.
On the other hand, I don't really understand Altman's compensation. I'm not sure I would WANT to work under a CEO that has literally ZERO stake in the company. There has to be more to the story.
This is a non-profit not a company. The board values the mission over the stock price of their for-profit subsidiary.
Having a CEO who does not own equity helps make sure that the non-profit mission remains the CEOs top priority. In this case though, perhaps that was not enough.
It's also extremely intertwined with and competes with for-profit companies
Financially it's wholly dependent on Microsoft, one of the biggest for-profit companies in the world
Many of the employees are recruited from for-profit companies (e.g. Google), though certainly many come from academic institutions too.
So the whole thing is very messy, kind of "born in conflict" (similar to Twitter's history -- a history of conflicts between CEOs).
It sounds like this is a continuation of the conflict that led to Anthropic a few years ago.
You have to understand that OpenAI was never going to be anything more than the profit limited generator of the change. It’s the lamb. Owning a stake in OpenAI isn’t important. Creating the change is.
Owning stakes in the companies that will ultimately capture and harvest the profits of the disruption caused by OpenAI (and they’re ilk) is.
OpenAI can’t become a profit center while it disrupts all intellectual work and digitizes humanities future: those optics are not something you want to be attached to. There is no flame retardant suite strong enough.
Altman conceived and raised $115 million for the company.
Agenda cyberpunk is on.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/21/the-non-profits-accelerati...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-19/altman-so...
Seems like it would be a great way to eventually maintain control over your own little empire while also obfuscating its structure and dodging some of the scrutiny that SV executives have attracted during the past decade. Originally meant as a magnanimous PR gesture, but will probably end up being taught as a particularly messy example of corporate governance in business schools.