The board should have been transparent about the dishonesty, especially around financial stakes, and I suspect the OpenAI employees and MSFT would have reacted differently.
The ChatGPT release is what made the AI movement go mainstream. It is why OpenAI is worth ~80 billion dollars.
By Gods am I glad that the board wasn't able to stop ChatGPT from being released.
Worth to who?
It is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay for it.
I seem to recall that the release in late November 2022 was only intended to be a way for volunteers on the Internet to experiment with it and provide feedback.