Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, and Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, speak during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 17, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Sam Altman’s sudden ouster from OpenAI on Friday shocked Silicon Valley. Not only was Altman, 38, CEO of the hottest startup on the planet, but he had emerged as the face of generative AI after his company’s ChatGPT chatbot went viral late last year.
From the outside, there were some signs of technological challenges at OpenAI, but no indications that tensions were emerging in the boardroom and the C-suite. Altman was still out and about, proselytizing the value of advanced artificial intelligence while also warning of its potential harms and advocating for regulation.
Just last month, reports surfaced that OpenAI was in talks with investors to sell employee shares at an astonishing $86 billion valuation. That’s after tech valuations corrected dramatically over the past 18 months from the decade-long bull market that was fueled by cheap money and a whole lot of FOMO (fear of missing out).
OpenAI was the industry darling in a time of difficulty. Microsoft was pouring in billions of dollars. The company topped CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list, which was published in May. Shortly before the list came out, Altman told CNBC, “I do think we are deep into a new technological wave and this is, I think, the biggest one in a while.”
That all made Altman’s exit hard to fathom and had some in the tech community comparing the move to Apple’s firing of Steve Jobs in 1985. In a statement on its website, OpenAI said, “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” The company named Mira Murati, who was the chief technology officer, as interim CEO.
If you followed Altman for the past two weeks, you would’ve seen an industry leader in the center of the action. Here’s an abbreviated timeline of the days leading up to Altman’s departure:
Nov. 6:
Altman took the stage at OpenAI’s DevDay event in San Francisco, where he announced GPT-4 Turbo, the company’s most powerful AI model. Users were also given access to all of OpenAI’s tools, such as its image-generator DALL-E and PDF upload, within ChatGPT.
At the event, Altman said prices for OpenAI’s software would be cut and individual users could customize ChatGPT. He also unveiled an OpenAI app store, an additional way that the company and its investors could monetize its products.
In a surprise appearance, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Altman on stage to discuss the future of OpenAI and their partnership. Microsoft committed an additional $10 billion earlier this year, the largest AI investment of 2023, according to PitchBook.
“I think we have the best partnership in tech,” Altman told Nadella onstage. “I’m excited for us to build AGI together,” he said, referring to artificial general intelligence.
Nov. 8:
ChatGPT temporarily crashed in the morning. The chatbot told users that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” and the update page called it a “major outage.” After a little over an hour, the issue was fixed before experiencing difficulties again later in the day.
OpenAI said in the evening that its issues were related to a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack,” the company said.
Issues persisted into the next day before being fixed.
Nov. 14:
Altman posted on X, formerly Twitter, that there would be a pause in signing up for ChatGPT Plus. He said there had been a surge in requests after the DevDay announcements and that usage “has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.”
Nov. 16:
Altman appeared at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, speaking on AI.
At 3:28 p.m. ET on Friday, OpenAI published the blog post announcing Altman’s dismissal. At the same time, the company said Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, was being stripped of his role as chairman of the board but would stay on as an executive.
Here’s what happened next:
4:46 p.m. ET:
Altman made his first public statement about his departure, writing on X that his experience at the company was “transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.”
7:09 p.m. ET:
Brockman announced on X that he’d quit the company “based on today’s news,” and said he was “super proud of what we’ve all built together since starting in my apartment 8 years ago.”
11:42 p.m. ET:
In an X post, Brockman provided a detailed account of Altman’s removal.
He said that on Thursday night, Altman received a text from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever asking if they could talk the next day at noon. On Friday afternoon, Brockman wrote, Altman joined a Google Meet with OpenAI board members Sutskever, Tasha McCauley, Adam D’Angelo and Helen Toner. Brockman, who was chairman of the board at this time, wasn’t there.
In the meeting, Sutskever told Altman he was out as CEO. Shortly after that, Sutskever informed Brockman he was being removed as chairman but could remain president. OpenAI’s blog post was released at “around the same time,” Brockman wrote.
He said that it appeared Murati only knew of the move the night before. Altman reposted Brockman’s chronicling of the events.
Nov. 18:
Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap sent a memo to OpenAI employees addressing the firing. Lightcap said everyone was caught by surprise at the board’s decision and said Murati “has our full support as CEO.”
“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices,” Lightcap wrote.
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk gestures behind protective glass during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a meagdonor and adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, is now seeking to influence Germany’s election, posting an endorsement on X of the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
In a post Thursday night, Musk wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
Musk, who has over 200 million listed followers on the site that he owns, made the comment while sharing a post from far-right influencer, Naomi Seibt, who claimed that Germany’s “presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example,” referring to the president of Argentina.
Seibt has a history of promoting white nationalist ideology, The Guardian previously reported, and has denied the validity of scientific consensus around climate change, namely that it’s driven by fossil fuel emissions.
In a post on X, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called Musk an “out of touch billionaire running the incoming Trump Administration” who “enthusiastically supports the neo-Nazi party in Germany.”
“The AfD’s mission is to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi movement,” Murphy wrote. He added that one of the party’s leaders has a license plate that’s “an open tribute to Hitler,” and another “described Judaism as the ‘inner enemy’ in Germany.”
Musk and Tesla’s investor relations team didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat, dismissed Musk’s claim that only the far-right party can “save Germany.”
Under Scholz’s leadership, Germany‘s left-wing coalition collapsed in November, and AfD is currently polling in second place ahead of February elections. Throughout Germany, where the AfD has placed highly in state elections, the other parties have generally refused to form coalitions with it.
Far right parties have also gained ground in the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and elsewhere. Many cheered Trump’s election, which Musk helped finance through $277 million in contributions to the campaign and related Republican causes.
Tesla’s stock is up about 75% since Trump’s victory, surpassing its prior all-time high from 2021 last week.
AfD has reportedly criticized Tesla and its factory outside of Berlin. The party claimed many of Tesla’s thousands of workers there commute in from Poland or Berlin, limiting the economic benefits to the local community in Brandeburg.
The AfD generally views electric vehicles as part of an ideological climate movement, and not good for Germany’s auto industry.
Europe has been a tough market for Tesla this year. According to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, sales of Tesla cars declined 40.9% in November, exceeding the overall 9.5% dip in sales of battery electric vehicles.
Elsewhere in Euopre, Musk endorsed right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and has voiced support for Nigel Farage in the U.K, a populist politician and head of Reform UK. In South America, Musk endorsed and has a friendship with Argentina’s President Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist.
Bitcoin dipped below the $93,000 mark earlier in the day before trading above that price in volatile trade.
By around 8:26 ET, bitcoin was trading at $93,809.39, according to Coin Metrics, down around 8% from 24 hours before when it was priced above $102,000.
The cryptocurrency hit an all-time high above $108,000 just this week, but has since sold off aggressively.
The Federal Reserve rattled markets in recent days, as it signaled fewer interest rate cuts next year. Equity markets took a hit, filtering through to crypto assets.
The price of bitcoin price has more than doubled this year, supported by a number of factors including the launch of spot exchange-traded funds and the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump. He has pledged pro-crypto policies and his victory at the polls helped propel bitcoin to its latest record high.
With some markets on edge due to the Fed, some of the steam has come out of assets that have seen big gains this year.
Tesla, which has been another big beneficiary of Trump’s win, continued its post-election slide with shares falling on Friday in premarket trade. Other big names like Nvidia were also lower during the session.
Bitcoin’s fall also dragged down other cryptocurrencies. Ether was down around 12%, and XRP plunged 10% from 24 hours prior, at around 8:27 a.m. ET.
Tesla electric vehicles are parked in a parking lot at the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg plant.
Patrick Pleul | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Shares of Tesla continued to slide on Friday, in what appeared to be a case of investors taking profits from the electric car maker’s blistering post-U.S. election rally.
As of around 6:30 a.m. ET, the firm’s shares were down nearly 5% in U.S. premarket trading, extending losses from earlier in the week. On Wednesday, Tesla shares slumped 8% to post their worst day since before Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in November.
Trump’s win prompted a sharp rally in Tesla shares, as investors increased their bets that the electric vehicle firm would benefit thanks to its CEO Elon Musk’s close ties to the president-elect. The stock is still up around 65% since Nov. 5’s market close — the night of the U.S. presidential vote.
Musk was appointed by Trump to co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, also referred to as “DOGE.” The proposed presidential advisory commission’s acronym shares the same name as the internet meme that inspired so-called “memecoin” cryptocurrency, dogecoin.
Musk was a major backer of Trump during the Republican’s election run, pouring in $277 million primarily into his campaign effort, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $439.4 billion, according to Forbes data.
Last month, Bloomberg News reported Trump’s transition team was planning to pursue a federal framework for regulating self-driving vehicles.
Tesla and Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on the report.
If true, the move would offer a major boost to Musk’s EV firm. Tesla is staking its future on the idea of rolling out mass fleets of autonomous vehicles, known as “robotaxi” services. At the firm’s “We Robot” event in October, Musk unveiled the firm’s Cybercab self-driving concept car.
In other Tesla-related news, data released by the European Automobile Manufacturers Association on Thursday showed sales of Tesla cars declined 40.9% in November, exceeding the overall 9.5% dip in sales of battery electric cars (BEVs) in the bloc.
Separately, Tesla also on Friday said it was recalling nearly 700,000 vehicles in the U.S. due to an issue with its tire pressure monitoring system. Software-related recalls aren’t typically a huge issue for Tesla, however, as it can issue “over-the-air” updates to fix these issues.