I think the board was surprised when nobody bought their claim of Sam’s vague wrongdoing.

Actually, I think every plot twist we’ve seen has been a surprise for them as they have consistently acted without 5 minutes of foresight.

And not just with the drama. For example, according to Stratechery, the clause in the contract saying Microsoft couldn’t use GPT-4 as a foundation for their own models was recently removed in a contract revision. If you don’t like your CEO, and Microsoft likes your CEO, and Microsoft has the rights to your models and code, it doesn’t take much to add up 2 + 2 + 2 = 6.