A better lesson is that a board can't govern a company if the company won't follow its lead. They were misaligned with almost the entirety of the employees.
Because they formed an additional entity, which is a for-profit, and has leadership treating the whole thing as a for-profit, and so employees also see what their eyes are telling them.
The misalignment is not accidental, it was carefully developed over the last few years.
Or: the employees all joined to work on AI, and they succeeded at building the top AI company, under Sam, and their support of Sam was not engineered or any sort of judgement error on their part. I like to imagine that the employees are smart and thoughtful and have full agency over their own values. It was the Board who apparently had zero pulse on the company they were supposed to oversee.
the majority if the employees at openai joined after chatGPT launched, so it's not like there's some sense of nostalgia or forlorn distress for what they built slowly changing. The stock comp (sorry, "PPUs"... which are a phantom stock plan lol) is also quite high (check levels.fyi) and would have been high 7 to low 8 figures for engineers if secondary/tender offers were made.
I agree it's not that deep - they wanted to join a hypergrowth startup, build cool stuff, and get paid. If someone is rocking the boat, you throw them off the boat. No mission alignment needed! :)
