The board was considering the requests to bring back Sam because they realized they were handling the situation badly and didn’t want the organization to blow up and fail at its mission, but they refused to resign unless and until suitably mission-aligned replacement board members were agreed upon (note that profit is not the nonprofit’s mission).
Of course they didn’t bring him back in the end, or resign, after all.
If the board had yielded to similarly minded replacements and brought back Sam, that isn’t the same as exonerating him, only realizing how badly they handled the firing. I can imagine that an independent investigation into the truth of the existing board’s allegations would still have been ordered by the new board, just as the new interim CEO actually did. If it was truly just a personality clash leading to mistrust, that would probably be the end of it. If there truly was malfeasance that makes Sam and unsuitable CEO, they’d probably then engage a PR firm to help make the case to the world far more persuasively than happened on Friday.
Yes, this is speculation, but I’ve been a nonprofit director and president myself, and if I were on that replacement board it’s what I’d do. In that case, the organization was much lower-profile than OpenAI, and we were spare-time volunteers with a tiny budget. The closest we came to self-dealing is when a long-time director wanted to become a paid software engineer contractor for us, but he left the board in order to make that ethically clear, and the remaining board approved the arrangement. Nothing hidden or dishonest there, and he’s continued to be a great help to the organization.
(Disclaimer: I stopped my own involvement with the org over 4 years ago myself, but that was truly because the rest of my life got too busy. There was no drama or anything around that.)