I also find it maddening how boards of directors rush to insulate themselves from any possible issue and are so quick to throw overboard the very people who enabled the success that they get to participate in. I'm thinking particularly of Travis at Uber and how he was thrown out of the thing that he built from scratch, which never would have worked without his extreme efforts. If I were on the OpenAI board, the bar for firing Sam would be so ridiculously high that he would have to have done something so outrageous, so illegal, etc., that I struggle to believe what he actually did could even remotely approach that standard.
what accomplishment of his has impressed you so much? his entire career has been:
1. start a dumb startup that goes nowhere
2. get a job at YC handing out other people's money
3. a very dumb and creepy crypto currency project
4. be CEO of openai, which means having no direct influence on the product or engineering at all