The surprise is more at the (EDIT: brazen) pathological lying.
Except that's not really true. Almost everyone on the board were either VCs themselves or had very strong ties to the them. In any case OpenAI would be irrelevant without significant investments from organizations/people who want a return on them. So it's basically a moot point: no VCs/big corporations = no fancy,extremely expensive to train & develop LLMs.