Sam Altman Will Be Fired

Money Talks, Failure Walks

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is going to be fired, probably within the next month. (Image by Gemini, from A Face in the Crowd.)

It’s inevitable. ChatGPT is losing market share rapidly. Apple is suing over trade secrets, and it seems to have an airtight case. Its great hardware was revealed to be a speaker. Its vaunted advertising business is failing. Everybody hates the dude. Even Elon Musk thinks he’s odious.

The last could be overcome, if OpenAI were still dominating the industry it invented in 2022. It wouldn’t matter if OpenAI were profitable. Or at least moving toward profitability.

But nothing is working. OpenAI needs to go public to fund its losses, and the losses of its funders. But SpaceX has soured the environment for such a move. Thus, Altman will be thrown over before the IPO is attempted, replaced by President Greg Brockman, who looks and sounds like a funeral director.

Everything Altman has done to hold on to power can be undone. There’s ample precedent. Adam Neumann was kicked to the curb at WeWork as it flew into the ground. The movie about it became a bad mini-series, despite casting Oscar winners Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway. (How do you lose with Anne Hathaway?) Travis Kalanick was pushed out at Uber, but that ship righted itself under former Expedia head Dara Khosrowshahi. It says a lot about the disappearing institutional memory of journalism and tech that none of this is being mentioned now.

Altman will survive. Neumann and Kalanick did. There are always fools ready to be parted from their money by a smooth-talking tech bro. But soon, very soon, this fact is going to come crashing down on all of us.