There's some glaring mistakes in your framing.

First, this is an unnamed OpenAI employee speaking, not OpenAI the organization.

Second, you miscomprehended the article. The employee did not "threaten to ruin a prominent researcher's career". The actual quote is "Why would you ruin your career?", which implies the researcher would damage their own career, i.e. via self-sabotage.

Then the actual "threat" is "If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice” which is an entirely different statement.