The Money Always Wins

It’s been four full days since Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI, and we still have no idea where he’s going to land. There are suggestions that Altman, one of the most powerful figures in AI, could return to the company if the board changes significantly—talks are reportedly under way. But there is also an offer on the table from Microsoft to start a new AI research group there, which would be a cruelly ironic outcome for OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit with the goal of drawing talent away from Silicon Valley’s biggest companies and developing AI safely.

How Altman got to this moment is telling. In the days after his firing, he managed to prove that he is far more than a figurehead, winning over a majority of OpenAI employees (including Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and the reported architect of his dismissal—it’s, uh, complicated) and some of the tech industry’s biggest luminaries. A number of OpenAI’s most powerful investors rallied around him. Altman may no longer run his own company, but, for now, he is emboldened. On Twitter this weekend, legions of OpenAI employees signaled their loyalty to him “I am Spartacus!”–style; Altman responded with a flurry of heart emojis. Getting unexpectedly fired in front of a global audience is assuredly stressful, but one gets the sense that it also amounted to a huge ego flex for the 38-year-old tech executive. You can see it in the weekend’s most indelible image: a selfie tweeted by Altman on Sunday as he visited OpenAI’s San Francisco offices to continue negotiations, lips pursed in mock disgust, a visitor’s lanyard clutched in his hand. “First and last time i ever wear one of these,” he wrote.” Altman was having fun. He was winning.

This is the triumph of a Bay Area operator and dealmaker over OpenAI’s charter, which purports to place the betterment of humanity above profit and personality. It’s a similar story for Microsoft and its CEO, Satya Nadella, who have invested billions in OpenAI and were reportedly blindsided by Altman’s firing. Quickly, the company used its investment in OpenAI, much of which is reportedly in the form of computing power instead of cash, as leverage to reopen negotiations. Those talks may fizzle, and Nadella may indeed bring Altman and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman over to Microsoft; if other OpenAI staffers flood in, as has been speculated, it would be akin to Microsoft acquiring Silicon Valley’s most sought-after company for little more than the price of its employees’ salaries. It’s a win-win situation for the tech giant: Regardless of what happens to OpenAI, the company will keep the access it currently has to OpenAI’s data and intellectual property, or it could subsume the company altogether. The immediate endgame seems similarly comfortable for Altman. He returns to his company with more power than ever before, or he continues his work with Microsoft’s full backing. Either way, he won’t be wearing the guest pass again.

[Read: OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation]

So although there is still much we don’t know about this saga and how it might end, one thing feels abundantly clear: The money always wins.

As my colleague Karen Hao and I reported over the weekend, the central tension coursing through OpenAI in the past year was whether the company should commercialize, raise money, and grow to further its ambitions of building an artificial general intelligence—a technology so powerful that it could outperform humans in most tasks—or whether it ought to focus its efforts on the safety of its potentially dangerous innovations. Altman represented the former faction, and his aggressive business decisions appear to have been a key factor in his dismissal.

After the shock of Altman’s firing subsided, I noticed a sense of admiration from some industry observers toward OpenAI’s board. Yes, the decision to sack the CEO was brazen and badly messaged, and the implications for the company and its investments may have been poorly thought out. But it was principled, an indication that OpenAI’s nonprofit corporate structure was working exactly as intended to protect the fate of the company’s technology from the whims of one leader. “Somebody finally held the tech bros accountable!” a tech executive texted me on Saturday morning. A former social-media executive proposed a tantalizing counterfactual to me: What if Facebook had been able to fire CEO Mark Zuckerberg before the turmoil of the 2016 election? What would the world look like now?

Altman may have been a true believer in OpenAI’s charter. But he’s also a true believer in scale and profit. His tenure as CEO was partly an argument that, in order to change the world with your technology, you need the money to build it and the ability to get others to invest in it. If Sutskever was the visionary of OpenAI, Altman was seemingly the person who could sell it to people. And it is Altman who reportedly leveraged his business relationships to put immense pressure on OpenAI’s board. He didn’t call OpenAI’s bluff over the weekend: Instead, he demonstrated what the company might look like without its multibillion-dollar corporate investments and without its money man. According to Bloomberg, that future included some investors potentially writing down the value of their OpenAI holdings to nothing.

[Read: Inside the chaos at OpenAI]

Now Altman and his team could be going to Microsoft to develop new artificial-intelligence tools, unimpeded by a charter. A cynical person might argue that, there, he would no longer need to maintain the pretense of answering first to humanity—as an employee of one of the world’s biggest technology companies, his primary obligation would be fiduciary. He would answer to Nadella and to shareholders. But no matter how noble Altman's intentions are, any moral leanings he might have ultimately mean very little to the money, which, regardless of where he lands, will continue to flow toward Microsoft and toward whatever products Altman and his team build. As of this afternoon, Microsoft was worth $1 trillion more than Google.

Silicon Valley is peerless when it comes to mythologizing its ideas men (and yes, they tend to be men.). In the industry’s telling, technologies and their founders succeed in a meritocratic fashion, based on the genius of the idea and the skill of its execution. OpenAI’s self-mythologizing went a step further, positioning itself almost in opposition to its own industry—a company so committed to an ideology and a purity of product that it would self-immolate to protect itself and others. Over the weekend, this ideology crashed against the rocks of a capitalist reality. As is always true in Silicon Valley, a great idea can get you only so far. It’s the money that gets you over the finish line.