OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman, the staff threaten to follow him to Microsoft, and five days later he is back
Five days, two boards, one near-walkout of seven hundred engineers, and a governance structure that did not survive the episode it had been designed for.
On Friday 17 November 2023 at 10:14 a.m. Pacific time, Sam Altman joined a Google Meet with the OpenAI board and was told he was no longer chief executive. Greg Brockman, the company's president, was removed from the board and shortly afterward resigned. Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, was named interim chief executive. The board's public statement said Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board". It did not specify what he had not been candid about.
Within four hours, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, who had not been told in advance, told Bloomberg his company's relationship with OpenAI was "strong". By Sunday, the board had reopened negotiations. By Sunday evening, the negotiations had collapsed. The interim chief executive role passed from Murati to Emmett Shear. By Monday morning, 6 a.m. Pacific, Microsoft announced that Altman and Brockman would join the company to lead a new advanced AI research group. By Monday afternoon, more than seven hundred of OpenAI's roughly seven hundred and seventy employees had signed an open letter saying they would resign and follow them.
The reinstatement and what it cost
By Tuesday evening, 21 November, an agreement had been reached. Altman returned as chief executive. The board was effectively dissolved and reconstituted with Bret Taylor as chair, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo as members, and a commitment to add further independent directors. As The Information reported in detail the following week, the deal was brokered substantially by Brad Smith and Reid Hoffman, with Microsoft's leverage being its hosting agreement, its API integration, and the realistic prospect that nine-tenths of the staff would walk.
It was governance theatre with consequential outcomes. The structure that had been designed to handle this scenario did not handle it.
The board structure that produced the firing, an unpaid majority-independent board with mission-control rights over the for-profit subsidiary, did not survive the episode. The reconstituted board moved over the next eighteen months toward a more conventional commercial governance structure, a process that produced its own controversy in 2024 and 2025. The five-day window in November 2023 is now studied at corporate-governance courses as the limiting case of what happens when a non-profit governance structure is asked to make a multi-billion-dollar decision under time pressure on Slack.
Discussion