The King Is Back in the Castle

If you come at the king, you best not miss.

OpenAI avoided the biggest own goal in corporate history and reinstalled Sam Altman as CEO, five days after firing him in a board-led coup. 

As coups go, this was bloodless and polite. It was also extremely fast. 

It took Steve Jobs 12 years to become CEO at Apple again after being fired in a coup. Jack Dorsey took seven years to regain the CEO position at Twitter in the same situation. In fact,  to find a coup whose success was even close to as brief as OpenAI’s, we have to look beyond business and into nation-states.

In 2002, the Venezuelan military deposed dictator Hugo Chávez and installed businessman Pedro Carmona as the president instead. Carmona got as far as changing Venezuela's official name back to the “Republic of Venezuela” from the more baroque “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” and dissolving both the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. At this point, everyone said, “Wait, actually, we’d rather have the dictator back,” and he was removed from power, allowing Chávez to reclaim his position. Carmona now lives in exile in Colombia. Total coup time? Thirty-six hours.

In 1981, a senior private in the Kenyan Air Force, Hezekiah Ochuka, led a coup against President Daniel arap Moi. The military stormed Kenya’s national broadcast system and tried to force the Air Force to bomb the State House. Military units loyal to the former president managed to regain control of the country, and Ochuka fled. He was eventually captured and executed. Total coup time? Six hours.

So, in terms of reversing coups, Altman leaves Jobs and Dorsey in the dust and takes third place behind Venezuela’s long-time dictator, Hugo Chavez. Not bad!

Here’s the current state of play: 

Altman is back as CEO. Three of the four OpenAI board members who instigated the coup are gone: Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley. The board now consists of Quora co-founder and original board member Adam D’Angelo, first-team all-pro Silicon Valley board member Bret Taylor, and Larry Summers. Yes, that Larry Summers, from the 2008 financial crisis and The Social Network. (Keith Rabois approves of this move. Emily Bell does not.)

The Bret Taylor hire is not a surprise; he was CTO of Facebook, co-CEO of Salesforce, and chairman of the board at Twitter before Musk took it over. Rumor has it that if you close your eyes and whisper, “Synergy, integration, innovation,” you can summon him like a Pokemon. Summers is sort of a surprise, but he adds some much-needed D.C. power player flavor to the gumbo. The fact that D’Angelo is sticking around belies rumors that his desire to knee-cap ChatGPT in favor of Quora’s chatbot, Poe, instigated this whole drama. Why he’s still there when the rest of the coup plotters are gone is anyone’s guess.

The plan is for these board members to approve a bigger board of up to nine directors, which might include Altman and someone from Microsoft. (I hope it will also include a wider diversity of directors, as both women on the board are now gone.)

There are three important implications: