Serious wrongdoing with smoking gun would have been the only justification for the board acting the way they did. This reflects very poorly on the OpenAI board. And makes it more likely that this affair is far for complete.
I predict that this is the beginning of the end for OpenAI. The company won't collapse overnight or anything, but its best people will start leaving in January, then its average people will leave over the course of 2024, and there will be little left by 2025. They may have enough money to live on as a zombie company for several years after that, but everyone will know that it is no longer what it once was or could have been.
If the board ended up acting rashly I expect the next thing to happen is that the board itself is exiled.
They all have enough money to be able to fight any legal challenges. This is not your regular, poor nonprofit paying slave wages.
You always claim "precedent" - so please show me, when has the board of a nonprofit even close to as high profile as open AI ever been removed by external pressure? As far as I can tell, we're on entirely new territory here.
I for one am glad Ilya is prevailing here - sama is the typical SV sociopath pushing growth at any cost. We really don't need any more of those guys at a place this important.
It is going pretty much according to the few ways in which it could go: lawsuit with unknown outcome (most probably by MSFT or other minority shareholder), reversal, board (or selected board members) resigns. The future timeline in which nothing changes and the board holds fast is not one that I think is viable, assuming Altman didn't murder anybody in broad daylight.
And while I in principle agree with your character assessment (though I wouldn't put it in those terms, I'm not qualified to diagnose people to that degree) that still doesn't mean you can do what you can do in any way that you want to do it without consequences. The board forgot for a hot moment that they are first and foremost representatives of the stakeholders and govern accordingly. To oust one founder and cause another founder to walk you have to have grave reasons and solid support from all of the stakeholders.
So far I have not seen these so the decision can't stand as it is. It's entirely possible that those grave reasons exist, and even then this should have been handled with some tact, not the blunt side of the axe.