OpenAI’s shareholders have fired Sam Altman once before, and they’re thinking about doing it again. According to the Wall Street Journal, some of OpenAI’s backers are starting to question whether Altman, who is increasingly having his attention monopolized by side projects, is the right guy to take the company public. Instead, their eyes are wandering toward another prominent tech exec.
The doubts about Altman’s fitness to serve as CEO of a publicly traded company apparently date back to that initial ouster, when some members of OpenAI’s board raised questions about some of Altman’s other investments. Altman, who has claimed to have no stake in OpenAI to avoid being driven by financial motivators, makes much of his money on other projects—and he’s increasingly tried to get his day job to pay for his side gigs.
Per the Journal, Altman recently asked the board of OpenAI to lead a funding round for Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup in which Altman is a major shareholder, and was, up until a few weeks ago, a board member. He stepped down so that a partnership between OpenAI and Helion could move forward. Altman also reportedly wanted OpenAI to lend financial backing to upstart rocket maker Stoke Space, and at one point floated an acquisition of the firm. Altman is a shareholder in the SpaceX competitor via his venture capital firm Hydrazine.
OpenAI has decided that it’s done spending time on side projects, internally, and will instead keep its eyes on its core products, but that apparently hasn’t applied to Altman, who can’t help but dabble. In addition to having an interest in space and energy, Altman also has his creepy human verification company, World. While he hasn’t explicitly crossed streams between OpenAI and World yet, the two are a pretty obvious pair, if not simply symbiotic in their relationship.
It probably doesn’t help that Altman himself doesn’t really seem to think he’s cut out to be CEO for the IPO. In an appearance on the Big Technology podcast, Altman said he was “zero percent” excited to be the head of a publicly traded company. “Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying,” he said.
It’s probably annoying to the board that their current CEO seems to hate his job. No wonder they’re reportedly looking elsewhere. According to the Wall Street Journal, the current favorite to take the spot is current OpenAI board chair and former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor—the guy who co-created Google Maps, served as CTO at Facebook, and was the chair of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. That’s quite a diverse background, but the difference between Taylor and Altman seems to be that Taylor was focused on only one role at a time, while Altman wants to do it all at once.
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