Less than a week after being sacked by the board, OpenAI rehires Sam Altman as CEO
Following his dismissal, hundreds of OpenAI employees, including co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever, signed a letter urging that the other board members resign or quit the company.
OpenAI announced the return of Sam Altman as CEO early Wednesday morning. The move comes as a result of intense pressure from employees and investors on the board, which removed him less than a week ago.
Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join OpenAI’s board of directors, with Taylor serving as chair. Adam D’Angelo, co-founder and CEO of the question-and-answer startup Quora, will continue to serve on the board.
Concurrent with Altman’s return, board members Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever were ousted. All were involved in ousting Altman, though Sutskever eventually retracted his support for the coup and is still an OpenAI employee as of Wednesday.
On Saturday, reports broke that a group of notable investors, including Microsoft, Tiger Global, Thrive Capital, and Sequoia Capital, were attempting to reverse the board’s decision from the day before. None of those companies had board seats, and the decision caught them off guard.
