This is the wildest coup in Silicon Valley history

• The wildest coup in Silicon Valley's history just took place over the last 48 hours.
• OpenAI booted CEO Sam Altman, nearly hired him back, then went with 2 other CEOs.
• Altman has now been hired by Microsoft and OpenAI looks in danger of falling apart.

The most exciting business in artificial intelligence just blew itself up.

Over the course of the weekend, the board of OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman, appointed CTO Mira Murati as interim chief, reopened negotiations to bring Altman back, then appointed a different interim CEO in the form of Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear.

Sam Altman has now been scooped up as an employee by Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest investor. A number of OpenAI employees, including former president Greg Brockman, look set to follow.

Up to speed?

The drama has been playing out pretty much continuously since late Friday. As of Monday morning, current and former OpenAI executives and employees have been posting their solidarity for Altman on X, mostly with ❤️ emojis, implying an imminent mass departure of talent.

Good to know the standard bearer of AI, a technology that is already reshaping society, is being handled in a measured way, eh?

There is still huge speculation about why really one of the most powerful and commercially savvy tech CEOs right now would be shown the door.

The board said it had pushed out Altman because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board," but has since stayed relatively silent.

Silicon Valley and its hangers-on have filled that silence.

"Goodbye OpenAI," AngelList founder Babak Nivi said in a post on X on Monday. "I recommend all your employees quit. Your board has defamed your old CEO, kept you in the dark all weekend, and gone through two CEOs in about 48 hours."

Nivi added that the board had been "incompetent beyond measure."

OpenAI has been a remarkable rocket ship since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, inking big corporate deals and targeting a valuation of $86 billion.

Altman — who is not an AI researcher by background — recently showed his commercial chops with OpenAI's first ever developer day and the launch of custom GPTs.

He has recently rubbed shoulders with world leaders like British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, US Vice President Kamala Harris, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the AI Safety Summit in London at the start of the month.

Almost every startup has looked on in envy.

But all of this drama has only been possible because OpenAI is not a typical venture-backed startup.

The company was set up as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of building safe and beneficial intelligence "for the benefit of humanity." Three years later, it created a "capped profit" company known as OpenAI LP, enabling it to raise huge amounts of cash to hire talent and buy compute power.

But the board itself remains, unusually, free of investor influence and thus focused on OpenAI's original mission.

It comprises OpenAI's cofounder and supposed orchestrator of the coup Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, relatively unknown entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner who has spent the past five years heading up strategy for Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

For those who think OpenAI was prioritizing making money off ChatGPT and other products over safety, Altman's departure was not a "fuck up" but rather a "Hail Mary."

Gary Marcus, a godfather of AI and former Googler, said the board's job was to look out for humanity and not to protect the brand, adding that they "must have seen danger in something Sam was doing."

The appointment of new CEO Shear, who has previously expressed worries that AI could destroy all life, lends weight to this theory.

Another astonishing side-effect of this generally astonishing saga has been Microsoft, which has backed OpenAI to the tune of $13 billion, getting sideswiped by the news.

But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has not let a good crisis go to waste. Despite being blindsided by Altman's firing on Friday, he had hired both Altman and Brockman to lead a new advanced AI research team at Microsoft, while also reaffirming its commitment to OpenAI.

The clear takeaway from the chaos: Nadella looks like he's won.