Apple was a declining company when Jobs came back the second time. He also managed to get the ENTIRE board fired, IIRC. He created a new board of his own choosing.
So in theory he could have raided the company for its assets, but that's obviously not what happened.
By taking $1 salary, he's saying that he intends to build the company's public value in the long term, not just take its remaining cash in the short term. That's not what happens at many declining companies. The new leaders don't always intend to turn the company around.
So in those cases I'd say the CEO is stealing from shareholders, and employees are often shareholders.
On the other hand, I don't really understand Altman's compensation. I'm not sure I would WANT to work under a CEO that has literally ZERO stake in the company. There has to be more to the story.
This is a non-profit not a company. The board values the mission over the stock price of their for-profit subsidiary.
Having a CEO who does not own equity helps make sure that the non-profit mission remains the CEOs top priority. In this case though, perhaps that was not enough.
It's also extremely intertwined with and competes with for-profit companies
Financially it's wholly dependent on Microsoft, one of the biggest for-profit companies in the world
Many of the employees are recruited from for-profit companies (e.g. Google), though certainly many come from academic institutions too.
So the whole thing is very messy, kind of "born in conflict" (similar to Twitter's history -- a history of conflicts between CEOs).
It sounds like this is a continuation of the conflict that led to Anthropic a few years ago.