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Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, who helped oust CEO Sam Altman in November, broke her silence this week when she spoke on a podcast about events inside the company leading up to Altman’s firing.

One example she shared: When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance and found out about it on Twitter. Toner also said Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund.

Altman was renamed CEO less than a week after he was fired, but Toner’s comments give insight into the decision for the first time.

“The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the company’s public good mission was primary, was coming first — over profits, investor interests, and other things,” Toner said on “The TED AI Show” podcast released on Tuesday.

“But for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board,” she said.

Toner said Altman gave the board “inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place” on multiple occasions.

“For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever,” Toner said. “But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board — especially a board that is supposed to be providing independent oversight over the company, not just helping the CEO to raise more money.”

Toner explained that the board had worked to improve issues. She said that, in October, a month before the ousting, the board had conversations with two executives who relayed experiences with Altman they weren’t comfortable sharing before, including screenshots and documentation of problematic interactions and mistruths.

“The two of them suddenly started telling us… how they couldn’t trust him, about the toxic atmosphere he was creating,” Toner said. “They used the phrase ‘psychological abuse,’ telling us they didn’t think he was the right person to lead the company to AGI, telling us they had no belief that he could or would change.”

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a broad term that refers to a type of artificial intelligence that outperforms human abilities on various cognitive tasks. 

An OpenAI spokesperson was not immediately available to comment.

Earlier this month, OpenAI disbanded its team focused on the long-term risks of AI a year after the company announced the group. The news came days after both team leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announced their departures from the Microsoft-backed startup. Leike, who has since announced he is joining AI competitor Anthropic, wrote on Friday that OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

Toner’s comments and the high-profile departures follow last year’s leadership crisis.

In November, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman, saying it had conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” it said.

The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reported that while Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that artificial intelligence would not harm humans, others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.

Altman’s removal prompted resignations and threats of resignations, including an open letter signed by virtually all of OpenAI’s employees, and uproar from investors, including Microsoft. Within a week, Altman was back and board members Toner and Tasha McCauley, who had voted to oust Altman, were out. Sutskever relinquished his seat on the board and remained on staff until he announced his departure on May 14. Adam D’Angelo, who had also voted to oust Altman, remains on the board.

In March, OpenAI announced its new board, which includes Altman, and the conclusion of an internal investigation by law firm WilmerHale into the events leading up to Altman’s ouster.

OpenAI did not publish the WilmerHale investigation report but summarized its findings.

“The review concluded there was a significant breakdown of trust between the prior board and Sam and Greg,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said at the time, referring to president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The review also “concluded the board acted in good faith… [and] did not anticipate some of the instability that led afterwards,” Taylor added.

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

By year-end there should be around 20 tech IPOS, says Barclays' Kristin DeClark

Navan, the business travel, payments, and expense management startup, filed on Friday afternoon to go public.

Its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “NAVN.”

Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to the S-1 filing.

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.

Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and also made the 2024 list.

The IPO market has bounced back this year, with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals (roughly 200 IPO filings in all) and $30 billion in proceeds, up over 23% year over year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital. It has been the best year for IPOs since 2021, though still far below the Covid offering boom years, when over $142 billion (2021) and $78 billion (2020) was raised by IPOs.

This year’s deal flow has been highlighted by hot AI names like Coreweave, as well as some of the startup world’s most highly valued firms from the past decade, such as fintech Klarna and design firm Figma, crypto companies Circle, Bullish and Gemini, and some long-awaited IPO candidates finally hitting the market, such as Stubhub this week, though its shares have slumped since the first day of trading. Top Amazon reseller Pattern went public on Friday.

Other startups are expected to pursue deals given the increased investor appetite.

The Renaissance IPO ETF is up 20% this year.

Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.

The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.

Customers include Unilever, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin and Geico.

It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions during the six months ended July 31, according to the filing, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.

“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, the finance teams who demand precision and control, the executive assistants juggling itineraries, and the program admins ensuring seamless events,” the co-founders wrote in an IPO filing letter.

“We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems. Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents. They struggled to adhere to company policies, with little visibility into those policies, and after all that, they spent even more time on tedious expense reports after a trip. We felt the pain of finance teams struggling to gain visibility into fragmented travel spending and to enforce policies, and the frustration of suppliers unable to connect directly with the high-value business travelers they sought to serve,” they wrote in the filing.

Revenue grew 33% year-over-year from $402 million in fiscal 2024 to $537 million in fiscal 2025, according to the S-1 filing. The company reported a net loss that decreased 45% year-over-year from $332 million in fiscal 2024 to $181 million in fiscal 2025. Gross margin improved from 60% in fiscal 2024 to 68% in fiscal 2025.

The business travel and expense space is crowded, with fellow Disruptors Ramp and Brex, and TravelPerk, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel.

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

A gamer plays soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 on an Xbox console.

Sezgin Pancar | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Microsoft said on Friday that it will increase the recommended retail price of several Xbox consoles in the U.S. starting in October because of “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”

The company said it would not increase prices for accessories such as controllers and headsets, and that prices in other countries would stay the same.

While Microsoft didn’t explicitly attribute the increase to the Trump administration’s tariffs, many consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way. President Donald Trump has issued tariffs this year on multiple countries with a stated goal to bring more manufacturing to the U.S.

“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration,” Microsoft said on its website.

It’s the second time Microsoft has raised prices on its consoles in the U.S. this year. Rivals Sony and Nintendo have also raised console prices in the U.S. as Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Here are the changes, according to a PDF posted on Microsoft’s website:

  • Xbox Series S will start at $399, up from $379 previously. A version with 1TB of storage costs $449.
  • Xbox Series X Digital console now costs $599, a $50 increase. The Xbox Series X with a disc drive also got a $50 increase to $649.
  • The most expensive version, with 2TB of storage, costs $799, up from $729.

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StubHub’s stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

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StubHub's stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

Ticket reseller StubHub signage on display at the New York Stock Exchange for the company’s IPO on Sept. 17, 2025.

NYSE

After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.

StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.

StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.

Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.

StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.

Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.

While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.

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