Doubts about Altman’s fitness to serve as CEO of a publicly traded company apparently date back to his initial removal, when some members of OpenAI’s board raised questions about some of Altman’s other investments. Altman, who claims to have no stake in OpenAI to avoid being motivated by financial motivations, makes most of his money on other projects — and he’s trying to get his day job to pay for his additional programs.
According to the Journal, Altman recently asked OpenAI’s board to lead a funding round for Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup in which Altman is a major shareholder, and was a board member until a few weeks ago. He stepped down so that the partnership between OpenAI and Helion could move forward. Altman also reportedly wanted OpenAI to give financial backing to upstart rocket maker Stoke Space, and at one point initiated an acquisition of the firm. Altman is a shareholder in SpaceX competitor through his venture capital firm Hydrazine.
OpenAI has decided that it is done spending time internally on side projects, and will instead keep its eye on its core products, but this clearly does not apply to Altman, who can’t help but frown. In addition to being interested in space and energy, Altman also has his own creepy human verification company, World. Although they have not yet clearly crossed the currents between OpenAI and World, the two are a very clear pair, if not simply symbiotic in their relationship.
It probably doesn’t help that Altman himself doesn’t really think he’s qualified to be CEO for an IPO. In an appearance on the Big Technology Podcast, Altman said he was “zero percent” excited to become the head of a publicly traded company. “Am I excited about OpenAI becoming a public company? In some ways I am, and in some ways I think it would be really annoying,” he said.
It’s probably annoying to the board that their current CEO hates his job. No wonder they’re reportedly looking elsewhere. According to the Wall Street Journal, the current favorite to take this position is current OpenAI board chair and former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor — the guy who co-created Google Maps, served as CTO at Facebook, and was president of Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. That’s quite a diverse background, but the difference between Taylor and Altman seems to be that Taylor only focused on one role at a time, whereas Altman wanted to do it all at once.
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