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.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.
Honor
Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.
The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.
Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.
In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.
Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.
Honor vs. Samsung
Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.
Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.
Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.
“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.
“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.
At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.
“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.
“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.
Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.
In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.
Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.
The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.