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Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, arrives for a bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum for all U.S. senators hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., September 13, 2023. 

Leah Millis | Reuters

OpenAI’s unusual company structure weakened Sam Altman’s position as CEO and left him open to surprise on Friday when he was quickly ousted from the company.

It’s rare to see founders forced out of a firm they helped co-found. At Uber, for example, founder Travis Kalanick was forced out only after a series of reports on privacy issues and allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment at the ride-sharing company. 

But Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, who also left OpenAI Friday, didn’t have the power that Kalanick had.

“I have no equity in OpenAI,” Altman said in a May Senate hearing on A.I. Senator John Kennedy’s reaction offered some foreshadowing.

“You need a lawyer or an agent,” Kennedy said in a now-prescient joke.

The structure of the company helps explain how he was left in a vulnerable position that, as he said on Saturday, left him feeling “a little screwed.”

OpenAI’s capped profit structure

The easiest way to think of OpenAI’s structure is to picture a waterfall. The board of directors sits at the top. OpenAI Global, the capped-profit company in which Microsoft invested billions and of which Sam Altman had become the global face, sits at the bottom. There’s some stuff in the middle.

So let’s start at the very top of the waterfall. OpenAI’s board of directors – the ultimate decision body and the group responsible for pushing Altman out – controls OpenAI’s 501(c)(3) charity, OpenAI Inc. That charity is the nonprofit of which you may be aware. It was established to “ensure that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity.”

The company’s website says the nonprofit’s charter takes “precedence over any obligation to generate a profit.” In other words, the nonprofit is the priority, while the capped-profit Open AI Global subsidiary is not.

There’s a holding company and another LLC called OpenAI GP, which both give the board ownership or control over OpenAI Global. Again, that’s the company Microsoft invested in. It’s the one you hear about in the news when Altman talks about ChatGPT developments and whatnot. What’s important here is that OpenAI Global had no control. It was the one controlled or owned by all of the other entities in various ways.

So now you’re probably wondering — why have a for-profit company at the bottom of a corporate structure if everything’s just going to be run by a nonprofit? There’s a reason for that, too.

Limited returns

OpenAI added its capped profit OpenAI Global subsidiary in 2019. The shift was prompted by several things, including a desire to attract top employees and investors with “startup-like equity.”

Remember, if your ultimate goal is to ensure the safe use of AI, you’re going to want to bring on some really smart people. And that’s tough when every big company on the market is willing to pay them top dollar to work. So if you’re OpenAI, you need incentives.

Part of that shift to a for-profit model meant reassessing how OpenAI rewarded those employees and investors who gambled on the company. The company settled on a capped-profit approach. It limited the “multiple” that investors could make by sending cash OpenAI’s way.

At the time, the profit cap was set at 100x of a first-round backer’s investment. In plain language, if investors put in $1, even if OpenAI was making billions of dollars in profit, that investor would be limited to $100 in total direct profit. It would still be a sizeable return, but not unlimited.

But remember, the core mission of the nonprofit is to control the development of artificial general intelligence. And all investors and employees are subject to that mission above anything else, including the for-profit company.

OK, so we have a nonprofit with a business that makes profits in order to attract top talent. How does Altman fit in here and how’d he get ousted?

Sam Altman’s missing equity

Altman had a board seat and was the best-known OpenAI personality. Aside from a small investment through a YCombinator fund (Altman was formerly its president), he doesn’t have any equity in the company. And that meant he didn’t have much control if anything turned against him.

He even joked about it Friday evening: “If I start going off, the OpenAI board should go after me for the full value of my shares.”

In fact, it reportedly worried some investors that Altman didn’t have ownership in the company he helped co-found, despite Altman’s public pronouncements that he was committed to OpenAI because he loved the work.

Most founders at later-stage companies take advantage of a dual-class share structure. Two tiers of shares are created — a set of shares for venture investors and the general public, if the company makes it to an IPO, and a more powerful set of shares reserved for founders or, in some cases, major investors.

CEOs and founders use dual-class share structures to protect themselves from losing control of their company. The rights assigned to these shareholders vary, but they often include outsize voting power, guaranteed board seats, or other governance provisions that make it hard for a board to topple them even if a company goes public. Some companies, like Google, even have three classes of shares, for its founders, employees, and investors.

Altman didn’t have those protections. Brockman, the former OpenAI president, said that Altman found out he was “being fired” in a virtual meeting Friday noon. Altman’s only heads up, Brockman said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was a text from OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever a day before.

Investors like to back visionary founders. Some, like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, have centered their investment theses around the idea. Not having equity in the company could have been perceived as reducing Altman’s “skin in the game,” so to speak. But it also meant that Altman, lacking those protections, was open to a boardroom coup.

At Uber, five major investors demanded Kalanick’s departure immediately, including one of the company’s largest shareholders Benchmark, after months of negative reports on workplace culture and other controversies. OpenAI, by contrast, hasn’t seen a similar storyline emerge. Altman is a divisive figure, and many critics have worried about the impact OpenAI’s ultimate goal — artificial general intelligence, or AGI — would have for humanity. 

OpenAI’s small board lacks the experience that would be expected from a company of its size and importance. None of its largest backers, not even Microsoft, have board seats. Until Altman and Brockman’s departure, it was composed of three outside directors and three OpenAI executives. 

Brockman wasn’t involved in Altman’s firing, meaning that every outside director and Sutskever would have had to all vote to fire Altman. With no allies on the six-person board, it was a mathematical impossibility that Altman could win. 

It isn’t clear what comes next for Altman or OpenAI. Litigation is possible, given the apparently swift nature of his departure. Some of Silicon Valley’s most influential law firms have represented OpenAI or its investors in various deals, and any courthouse proceedings will likely be closely watched.

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

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Okta pops more than 20% on strong earnings and guidance beat

Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta Inc., smiles during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco on April 4, 2022.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Okta shares soared 22% on Tuesday after the cloud-based identity management company delivered strong fourth-quarter earnings and beat estimates on guidance.

The move put the stock on pace for its best day in more than a year.

Okta posted adjusted earnings late Monday of 78 cents per share, while revenue increased 13% from a year earlier to $682 million. That beat the average analyst estimates of 73 cents per share in earnings and $669.6 million in revenue, according to LSEG.

First-quarter revenue should come in between $678 million and $680 million, which also topped estimates.

On the company’s earnings call, CEO Todd McKinnon called it a “blowout quarter” as bookings topped $1 billion in a single period for the first time.

“We’re excited about the momentum we’ve built going into FY 2026 and are taking the right steps to advance our position as the leader in the identity market,” McKinnon said. “More and more customers are looking to consolidate their disparate and ineffective identity systems, and Okta is there to meet them with the most comprehensive identity security platform in the market today,” McKinnon added.

Okta allows companies to manage employee access or devices by providing tools such as single sign-on and multifactor authentication. Shares have rallied about 35% this year, including Tuesday’s pop, after slumping 13% in 2024. In late 2023, Okta suffered a high-profile data breach that gave access to client files through a support system.

Some Wall Street firms turned more positive on the stock after the latest results, with both D.A. Davidson and Mizuho upgrading their ratings. D.A. Davidson called the likelihood of double-digit growth “durable” as the company shows signs of stabilization.

Mizuho’s Gregg Moskowitz said the firm “underestimated” the upside to committed remaining performance obligations, or subscription backlog that the company expects to recognize as revenue over the next year.

“More broadly, OKTA continues to be a clear leader in the critically important identity management market,” Moskowitz wrote. “And we now have a higher confidence level that OKTA will increasingly benefit from its group of newer products that have already begun to drive a meaningful contribution.”

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Okta CEO Todd McKinnon goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer

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‘Music to our ears’: Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC’s $100 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

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'Music to our ears': Qualcomm CEO welcomes TSMC's 0 billion investment to boost U.S. chipmaking

We're at the beginning of a 'significant upgrade' for AI smartphones, Qualcomm CEO says

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.‘s $100 billion commitment to expand manufacturing in the U.S. is “great news,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told CNBC on Tuesday, adding it helps with diversification of chipmaking locations.

Amon also addressed U.S President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, suggesting longer term technology trends would outweigh any short term uncertainty.

Trump announced on Monday that TSMC would invest $100 billion in the U.S. which would go toward building more chip fabrication plants in Arizona. TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer and supplies chips to the likes of Qualcomm, Apple and Nvidia.

The U.S., under leadership of both Trump and former President Joe Biden, has sought to bring more cutting-edge chip manufacturing to American soil on the grounds that it is a matter of national and economic security to have these advanced technologies made closer to home.

Many in the technology industry have backed these plans, including Qualcomm.

“Look, this is great news,” Amon said. “It shows that semiconductors are important. It’s going to be important for … the economy. Economic security means access to semiconductors. More manufacturing is music to our ears.”

Amon said that some of Qualcomm’s chips are already manufactured in TSMC’s existing plants in Arizona and in the future, the company will get more semiconductors made in the U.S.

“TSMC is a great supplier of manufacturing for Qualcomm. They have a facility in Arizona. We already have chips built in Arizona. The more capacity that they put we’re going to use it, same way we’ve been using in Taiwan, we’re going to use it in other locations,” Amon said.

Global companies are also digesting the imposition of tariffs by the U.S. on Mexico and Canada as well as additional duties on China.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Amon said it’s currently difficult to predict the impact on Qualcomm from the tariffs.

“It’s hard to tell because you don’t know exactly how this is going to go. The interesting thing is we’re big
exporters of chips. We’re not an importer of chips … Chips are going to devices. They’re made all over the world, and it’s hard to really know what is happening,” Amon said.

“We’re just is going to navigate based on whatever the outcome is.”

The Qualcomm CEO said there are a number of key technology trends that are likely to support the U.S. giant’s business in the long term, over the short term tariff uncertainty.

We are right at the “beginning of a significant upgrade for AI smartphones. We’re seeing PCs changing to AI PCs. Cars are becoming computers. That’s what’s driving our business, not necessarily what we’re going to see in the short term,” Amon said.

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

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Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

Samsung’s extended reality ‘Project Moohan’ headset on display at the Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

Samsung will launch its extended reality headset this year, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC on Tuesday.

The device, dubbed Project Moohan, is Samsung’s answer to Apple‘s $3,500 Vision Pro, which was launched last year.

Samsung teased the headset last year and put it on display at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Samsung refers to the product as “extended reality” or XR device which aims to merge the digital and physical world. However, there are currently few details about the device. Four cameras are visible in the front lens of the physical headset and there appears to be touch controls on the side.

Samsung worked alongside both Qualcomm and Google to develop a new kind of operating system for these kind of devices, known as the Android XR platform.

In December, Samsung said Google Gemini would be installed in the headset allowing wearers to experience a “conversation user interface.”

This would presumably enable users to interact with Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to help navigate through apps and tasks. The cameras also suggest there will be some sort of gesture control similar to Apple’s Vision Pro.

“To me, the breakthrough technology is a combination of advanced vision capability with intelligence that understands user intention. I think without the intelligence part, it’s a defective product,” Patrick Chomet, executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile division, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

Chomet hinted at a world envisioned by many consumer electronics firms, where smarter AI digital assistants are able to more intuitively understand user requirements on a device.

Samsung was one of the early players in virtual reality headsets, a market that never really took off the way many companies had predicted. But with technology advancing in areas from displays to chips, mixed or extended reality has been touted by big players as a new frontier in computing.

Samsung teased a future product roadmap during a January presentation when it launched its flagship S25 series of smartphones. One slide of the presentation showed outlines of future devices including a trifold smartphone, similar to Huawei’s Mate XT, as well as the Project Moohan headset.

The final product was a pair of glasses, which could hint at a different type of future XR headset. Smart glasses offer similar experiences to a headset but without wearing a bulky device.

Companies including Meta, Snap and XReal have been developing so-called augmented reality glasses. AR is when digital images are overlaid on the real world in front of you.

CNBC reported last year that Samsung, Qualcomm and Google were collaborating on a mixed-reality set of glasses. Samsung appeared to confirm such a collaboration at the S25 event in January.

Chomet did not give a timeline for the launch of a glasses product. However, he said that it is likely people will use multiple devices.

“Probably for quite some time still the smartphone will be the most used device,” Chomet said. “I see a world where people have various things including in their home, in their car. And the device will help you accomplish what you need to accomplish.”

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