Sam Altman Explodes at Board Members Who Fired Him

In a freewheeling interview with Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unloaded on the company's board members who abruptly sacked him in November 2023 — new perspective on the coup that fleshes out both the history of the company and Altman's chaotic character as a leading figure in the explosive AI industry.

At the time, the board said it no longer had the "confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," accusing him of not being "consistently candid in his communications."

After being asked if he was "traumatized" by being booted from the company and the chaos that followed, Altman had some choice words for the former board members, many of whom stepped down following his reinstatement just over a week later.

"And all those people that I feel like really fucked me and fucked the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess," adding that he was "fucking depressed and tired."

"And it felt so unfair," the billionaire told Bloomberg. "It was just a crazy thing to have to go through and then have no time to recover, because the house was on fire."

OpenAI quickly churned through several short-lived CEOs before rehiring Altman shortly afterward, a messy custody battle that shook the company — and its public perception — to its core.

The company's board went through a major game of musical chairs, with esoteric chief scientist Ilya Sutskever — who was one of the orchestrators of the coup and was quickly removed from the board as a result — quitting in May 2024 in a fit of rage.

At the time of Altman's dismissal, the company's board consisted of six people. Four of them voted to remove the CEO, and only one of them, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, stayed on the board following Altman's reinstatement.

Meanwhile, many signs have suggested that Altman has been attempting to consolidate power at the top of the company's ranks after news emerged last year that the company was moving to restructure its core business into a "for-profit benefit corporation."

After Bloomberg insinuated that he was being "sneaky" to turn the company into a competitive for-profit, Altman dismissed the turn of phrase, dismissing 2024 as a "crazy year."

"It’s a company that’s moving a million miles an hour in a lot of different ways," he told the publication. "I would encourage you to talk to any current board member 12 and ask if they feel like I’ve ever done anything sneaky, because I make it a point not to do that."

Altman, however, did appear more lucid about the chaos following his dismissal in late 2023.

"The one thing I’m more aware of is, I had had issues with various board members on what I viewed as conflicts or otherwise problematic behavior, and they were not happy with the way that I tried to get them off the board," Altman admitted in his interview with Bloomberg. "Lesson learned on that."

Just over a year later, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Altman holds more power over OpenAI than ever before. Case in point, weeks after Sutskever left, OpenAI dissolved the safety-oriented Superalignment team he was once in charge of.

Less than ten days later, OpenAI announced the creation of a new "safety and security committee" — with Altman at the helm.

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