It is incredibly shady, and has the same kind of sci-fi marketing bullshit vibe going on as Elon Musk's hyperloop and Mars missions, and, come to think of it, OpenAI's marketing.
Altman+OpenAI are a hype machine that's riding a bubble to get rich enough through any scheme to be able to turn around and milk users for data, just like facebook and google.
The only difference is, he gets to twist the focus towards this sci-fi AGI idea, which works like the distraction element of a magic trick. The media loves to talk about AGI and regulating Skynet, because it's a story that gets the imagination going --- certainly much more interesting than stories about paying people 2 dollars an hour to sift through data used to train a language model for offensive and traumatizing content to feed to the autocomplete parrot.
I think it's good that he got kicked off the position as CEO, but that does not suddenly make OpenAI a good actor. Some other jerk will take his spot.