I'm not saying this will happen, but it seems to me like an incredibly silly move.
If he didn't manage to keep OpenAI consistent with it's founding principles and all interests aligned then wouldn't booting him be right? The name OpenAI had become a source of mockery. If Altman/Brockman take employees for a commercial venture, it just seems to prove their insincerity about the OpenAI mission.
Of course, not for the petty reasons that you list. Sama has comprehensively explained why the original OS model did not work, and so far the argument – it's very expensive – seems to align with a reality where every single semi-competitive available LLM (since they all pale in comparison to GPT-4 anyway) has been trained with a whole lot of corporate money. Meta side-chaining "open" models with their social media ad money is obviously not a comparative business, or any business. I get that the HN crowd + Elon are super salty about that, but it's just a bit silly.
No, Sam's failure as CEO is not having done what is necessary to align the right people in the company with the course he has decided on and losing control over that.