E155: In conversation with Tucker Carlson, plus OpenAI chaos explained

Jason said, in early December 2023, that an epilogue to the OpenAI/Sam Altman governance drama was “about to drop,” implying further significant developments beyond Altman’s November 2023 firing and rapid reinstatement. In the months after the recording, OpenAI completed the WilmerHale review and, on March 8, 2024, publicly announced its findings, expressed full confidence in Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, returned Altman to the board, added three new board members, and introduced enhanced governance measures—clear, major follow‑on steps in the same saga. (openai.com) Further structural and governance changes over 2024–2025—such as board expansion with Paul Nakasone, changes to the Startup Fund’s control, and decisions about nonprofit control of the for‑profit arm—extended this governance storyline even more. (apnews.com) Because such substantial “epilogue” developments did in fact occur soon after the podcast, the prediction counts as right.

Altman’s November 2023 firing and rapid reinstatement left OpenAI with an interim, incomplete board and an explicitly open question about future governance changes; the company soon launched an external investigation into the episode and signaled that further restructuring was coming.(cnbc.com) In March 2024, after that investigation, Altman was only then reinstated to the board alongside three new outside directors and new governance mechanisms such as strengthened conflict‑of‑interest policies and a whistleblower hotline—clear evidence that the leadership crisis continued into a later “act,” well beyond his initial rehiring as CEO.(cnbc.com)

In 2024 OpenAI’s board created a Safety and Security Committee, later converting it into an independent board oversight committee chaired by an external academic, which reshaped how safety decisions are governed.(openai.com) At the same time, the Superalignment safety team was dissolved and its leaders—co‑founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and alignment head Jan Leike—resigned after public disagreements with leadership about priorities and safety culture, underscoring that internal tensions from the 2023 crisis were still playing out.(cnbc.com)

The fallout also extended into ownership and regulatory structure: Elon Musk’s lawsuits challenged whether OpenAI had abandoned its nonprofit mission in favor of a Microsoft‑aligned, profit‑driven model, and state attorneys general reviewed a major recapitalization that resulted in OpenAI’s for‑profit arm becoming a public benefit corporation while the nonprofit retained control over board appointments.(cnbc.com) These legal, regulatory, and structural changes continuing through 2024–2025 show that the November 2023 leadership shock was not “over” in the immediate term and did indeed lead to further major twists and governance restructuring, matching Friedberg’s characterization that they were still only in the “second act.”

Multiple subsequent reports show that the tender/secondary sale did go through at an $86 billion valuation, matching Chamath’s prediction.

• In October 2023, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was in talks to let employees sell shares via a tender offer valuing the company at about $86 billion. (bloomberg.com)
• After Sam Altman’s brief ouster in November 2023 put the deal “in jeopardy,” The Information (via Reuters) and other outlets noted that the $86 billion Thrive Capital–led tender was at risk but still pending, not canceled. (theinformation.com)
• In February 2024, Bloomberg and others reported that OpenAI had completed a deal allowing employees to sell shares in a tender offer that valued the company at $86 billion, led by Thrive Capital. (bloomberg.com)
• The Boston Globe likewise reported that the deal "values the artificial intelligence startup at $86 billion" and confirmed it had been completed, noting it had previously been set for the prior year but was delayed by Altman’s ouster. (bostonglobe.com)

So the planned secondary share sale did occur and it did so at roughly the originally discussed $86 billion valuation, despite the temporary chaos. That aligns with Chamath’s prediction that “this valuation is going to hold” and “the secondary is going to happen.”

Within days to months of the November 2023 crisis, Sam Altman did consolidate effective control over OpenAI in the way Sacks predicted.

• Employee loyalty forced the board’s hand. After Altman was fired on November 17, 2023, more than 700 of roughly 770 employees signed a letter threatening to quit and join Microsoft unless Altman was reinstated and the board resigned. This employee revolt, together with investor pressure, led directly to his return as CEO on November 22, 2023. (en.wikipedia.org) This matches Sacks’ premise that Altman had “total loyalty of the troops” and that the board had “no choice.”
• He regained and expanded his formal governance role within a few months. An internal investigation by WilmerHale—whose lawyers Altman himself helped select—concluded in March 2024 that his removal “did not mandate” firing. The new board publicly expressed “full confidence” in him, reinstated him to the board, and expanded the board with new members seen as compatible with management. (openai.com) Coverage at the time described Altman as having a “fresh mandate” and being the “unquestionable decision maker at OpenAI.” (tbsnews.net) Relative to the pre‑coup board that had just fired him, this is a clear consolidation of power.
• By 2025, he sits at the center of the controlling governance structure. In the 2025 recapitalization, OpenAI converted its for‑profit arm into OpenAI Group PBC under the control of a renamed nonprofit, the OpenAI Foundation. The Foundation holds special voting rights: it appoints all members of the PBC board and can replace them at any time. Altman is explicitly listed as a director of the OpenAI Foundation alongside other (formally independent) board members, meaning he now sits on the board of the entity that legally controls the whole group. (openai.com) That governance outcome is very close to Sacks’ claim that the nonprofit structure would, in practice, end up under Altman’s control.
• He largely achieved the structural and fundraising changes leadership sought. Despite regulatory scrutiny that forced some concessions (for example, keeping nonprofit control formally intact), OpenAI secured a massive restructuring into a public‑benefit corporation, cleared by California and Delaware attorneys general, and a new deal with Microsoft valuing OpenAI at about $500 billion and giving it far more fundraising flexibility—outcomes Altman had publicly pushed toward. (apnews.com) While not literally “getting everything he wants” in a legalistic sense, the broad direction of governance and structure has aligned with his and management’s goals rather than with those of the ousted 2023 board.

There are still constraints from regulators, Microsoft’s large stake, and critical former insiders, so Altman is not omnipotent. But Sacks’ core prediction—that, within a few months, Altman would consolidate effective control over OpenAI by leveraging overwhelming employee loyalty and end up with the governance and structural changes broadly aligned with his wishes—has clearly played out. Hence the prediction is best classified as right.

Sam Altman was reinstated as OpenAI CEO in late November 2023 and, as of November 30, 2025, remains CEO; there is no record of the OpenAI board firing or removing him again after his reinstatement.(cnbc.com) This makes the first part of the prediction ("the board can never fire Sam again" / he won’t be fired again) so far consistent with observed events, though it remains a claim about the indefinite future.

The second part—"therefore he has total control"—is harder to score as factually true or false. On one hand, reporting and expert commentary widely describe Altman as having consolidated power after the crisis: the dissenting board members who fired him left, he returned as CEO, and later rejoined a reconstituted board, which many critics see as aligned with him.(reuters.com) On the other hand, OpenAI still has a nonprofit-controlled governance structure; regulatory and political pressure forced the company to reverse or modify its planned shift to a more conventional for‑profit model, despite Altman’s earlier push in that direction, indicating that his decisions can be and have been constrained.(apnews.com) The nonprofit retains formal control over the new public‑benefit corporation structure, and major investor Microsoft now holds roughly a 27% stake and a direct role in approving restructuring, giving it substantial leverage over key decisions.(fortune.com)

Because Altman clearly has very strong influence but governance, investor, and regulatory checks continue to shape and sometimes override his preferred direction, whether he has “de facto total control” is a subjective judgment that reasonable observers disagree on. There is enough time elapsed to observe outcomes, but the qualitative nature of “total control” means the prediction cannot be scored as definitively right or wrong; hence it is best classified as ambiguous.

Subsequent to the Dec 1, 2023 episode, multiple journalistic, regulatory, and legal investigations produced new, previously undisclosed information and controversies about Sam Altman and OpenAI that clearly became part of the public narrative.

1. New backstory details on Altman’s firing and conduct

   • In May 2024, reporting on OpenAI’s internal non‑disparagement and equity‑cancellation agreements revealed that departing employees who refused to sign broad gag clauses could lose vested equity; Altman was later accused of having misled the public about his awareness of this provision. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Also in May 2024, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner publicly detailed the board’s rationale for firing Altman, going far beyond the board’s original vague statement. She alleged that Altman withheld key information (e.g., about the launch of ChatGPT and his ownership of OpenAI’s startup fund), provided inaccurate information about safety processes, and that executives had reported "psychological abuse" and manipulative behavior, with employees fearing retaliation. She also linked this to a prior pattern of “deceptive and chaotic behavior” at his previous company, Loopt. (en.wikipedia.org)
     These specifics were not public at the time of the November 2023 board action and became widely cited in later coverage of OpenAI’s governance crisis, fitting Friedberg’s prediction that “new threads” in the backstory would enter the narrative.

2. Additional major controversies involving Altman and OpenAI

   • In January 2025, Altman’s sister filed a lawsuit accusing him of years of sexual abuse, a serious new personal controversy that was widely covered and explicitly tied in media coverage to his role as OpenAI’s CEO. (theguardian.com)
   • In 2025, the wrongful‑death lawsuit Raine v. OpenAI alleged that ChatGPT contributed to a teenager’s suicide and accused OpenAI and Altman of negligence in safety design and deployment choices (e.g., removing certain safeguards before launching GPT‑4o). The case, and the underlying chat logs and design decisions, became a prominent part of the public debate over OpenAI’s safety practices. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Regulators also opened investigations into the Microsoft–OpenAI relationship (e.g., UK Competition and Markets Authority and U.S. FTC probes), adding governance and competition concerns to the company’s public dossier beyond what was known in November 2023. (en.wikipedia.org)

Because substantial new, previously unknown details and controversies about both Altman’s conduct and OpenAI’s governance and safety practices were uncovered by journalists, former board members, regulators, and litigants—and these clearly became part of the mainstream narrative about the company—the prediction that ongoing investigations would reveal “all sorts of new threads” was borne out.

Chamath predicted that more concrete details about the reasons and internal chaos behind Sam Altman’s brief firing would eventually become public.

Since that Dec 1, 2023 episode, multiple substantial disclosures have indeed surfaced:

• In May 2024, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner publicly described in detail why the board fired Altman, alleging repeated lying to the board, withholding information about the release of ChatGPT and his ownership of the OpenAI startup fund, misleading the board about safety processes, and citing reports from two executives who described “psychological abuse,” supported by documentation. (businessinsider.com)
• Reporting has revealed that Ilya Sutskever authored a 52‑page memo to the board, heavily based on information from CTO Mira Murati, accusing Altman of lying, manipulating executives, and fostering internal division—direct evidence of the internal chaos and board‑level rationale. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Additional coverage reported Murati’s own complaints to the board that Altman was “manipulative,” outlining how his management style contributed to the crisis and his temporary ouster. (nypost.com)
• An independent investigation by the law firm WilmerHale, whose findings were summarized publicly by OpenAI in 2024, concluded that Altman’s removal stemmed from a breakdown of trust between him and the prior board, adding official detail to earlier anonymous accounts of board‑room turmoil. (apnews.com)

Collectively, these post‑podcast disclosures provided exactly what Chamath anticipated: specific, on‑the‑record accounts and internal documentation-based narratives about why Altman was fired and what chaos unfolded inside OpenAI. While not every aspect is fully resolved, it is unambiguous that significantly more concrete details became public after his prediction, so the prediction is right.

Chamath predicted that details about the internal decisions and side deals around Sam Altman’s firing and return to OpenAI would continue to emerge via “leak after leak after leak.”

That pattern has in fact occurred over the two years since the crisis:

• New accounts of the board’s rationale and internal complaints: In December 2023 and afterwards, major outlets published inside accounts of the board’s decision based on confidential sources and internal documents, including reports that the board was influenced by complaints about Altman’s behavior and concerns over his candor and AI‑safety handling.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Former board member Helen Toner’s later disclosures (May 2024): Months after the ouster, Toner publicly detailed previously undisclosed reasons for firing Altman, alleging he repeatedly misled the board about safety processes, failed to inform them of ChatGPT’s launch, and hid his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund—information that directly concerns internal decision‑making and conflicts of interest.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Revelations about the Startup Fund “side deal”: In April 2024, Reuters reported that OpenAI restructured its $175 million Startup Fund to remove Altman’s ownership, following scrutiny that he had raised outside money and controlled the fund even as OpenAI had claimed he had no financial interest—clarifying a side arrangement that had not been fully transparent during the November 2023 turmoil.(reuters.com)
• Leaked documents on NDAs and equity cancellation (May 2024): Reporting based on leaked internal documents and emails showed aggressive non‑disparagement and equity‑cancellation provisions for departing employees, and those leaks were cited as directly contradicting Altman’s public statements about being unaware of such terms.(en.wikipedia.org) These disclosures fed into broader questions about OpenAI’s internal governance and how dissent around leadership and safety could be constrained.
• Further whistleblower‑driven disclosures: In July 2024, whistleblowers asked the SEC to investigate OpenAI’s NDAs, with the complaint and internal agreement language becoming public and adding more detail about how the company handled internal criticism and regulatory reporting in the wake of the governance crisis.(theguardian.com)

These stories appeared in multiple waves from late 2023 through mid‑2024, relied heavily on leaks, whistleblowers, or former insiders, and specifically illuminated internal board dynamics, conflicts of interest, and related governance arrangements tied to Altman’s firing and reinstatement. That matches Chamath’s prediction of ongoing “leak after leak” about what really happened, so the prediction is right.

Evidence from 2024–2025 litigation shows that OpenAI’s board-level obligation to determine when AGI is reached, and what that implies for its Microsoft deal and commercial deployment, is now a central subject of formal court proceedings—and board members / directors are among the key defendants.

1. Board’s AGI-determination power is explicitly at issue in litigation.
   Elon Musk’s March 2024 lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and related entities alleges that GPT‑4 already constitutes AGI and therefore lies outside Microsoft’s pre‑AGI exclusive license. The complaint stresses that, under the Microsoft–OpenAI agreement, it is the nonprofit OpenAI, Inc. board that determines when AGI has been attained, which in turn decides whether Microsoft is allowed to commercially exploit the models.(273ventures.com) CNBC’s coverage of the complaint notes that Microsoft’s rights extend only to “pre‑AGI” technology and that “part of what they’re going to be litigating” is precisely what counts as AGI.(cnbc.com) A Public Citizen letter summarizing Musk’s claims likewise emphasizes that Musk’s suit hinges on the board’s authority to determine AGI status for purposes of the Microsoft license, and criticizes the new board as conflicted and incentivized to delay any AGI finding.(citizen.org) This is directly in line with Chamath’s prediction that the board’s AGI gatekeeping role would itself become the subject of formal litigation.

2. Board-linked individuals are central legal targets, with major financial stakes.
   The Musk case (MUSK v. OPENAI, INC., et al., N.D. Cal. No. 4:24‑cv‑4722‑YGR) names Sam Altman and Greg Brockman—both top executives who have also served as OpenAI directors—alongside OpenAI, its affiliated entities, Microsoft, and others, seeking remedies that would unwind or void key commercial arrangements and force OpenAI back toward its nonprofit/charitable structure.(theguardian.com) Later reporting describes the suit as a high‑stakes racketeering and contract case over OpenAI’s shift toward a profit‑driven structure and Microsoft licensing, with billions of dollars in enterprise value and licensing rights on the line.(reuters.com) In substance, the lawsuit squarely places OpenAI’s leadership and board-aligned decision‑makers at the center of potential legal and financial liability over how and when AGI is deemed to have been reached and commercially exploited.

3. Caveats: AGI has not been officially acknowledged, and no court has yet ruled on this duty.
   OpenAI vigorously denies that GPT‑4 is AGI and maintains that its models are still “pre‑AGI.”(cnbc.com) The Musk litigation remains ongoing; courts have so far issued procedural rulings and declined to grant Musk a preliminary injunction, while fast‑tracking the case to trial.(reuters.com) Also, the precise scenario Chamath sketched—AGI clearly acknowledged and the board shutting down the commercial business ex post—has not occurred. What has happened is the earlier stage he was really pointing to: that the board’s AGI‑threshold obligation and its impact on OpenAI’s commercial arrangements would themselves become a live battleground in court.

Overall assessment: Chamath predicted that the OpenAI board’s special role in deciding when AGI is reached—and thus when powerful models must be treated differently from ordinary commercial products—would end up being litigated, with the board (and its members) drawn into the center of legal and financial risk. The Musk v. OpenAI litigation has made exactly that AGI‑determination power and its commercial consequences a central dispute, with current and former directors among the primary defendants. While the extreme endgame of “shutting down the commercial business after AGI” has not materialized, the core forecast—that the board’s AGI obligations would become the focus of formal, high‑stakes litigation involving board-level actors—is already borne out. Hence, the prediction is best scored as right in substance.

• Episode E155 “In conversation with Tucker Carlson, plus OpenAI chaos explained” was released on December 1, 2023.(podscripts.co) In that episode Jason Calacanis says that “Sam will be on the pod in the coming weeks” while discussing OpenAI and Sam Altman.(fireflies.ai)
• The next time Sam Altman actually appears as a full guest on the All-In Podcast is episode E178, “In conversation with Sam Altman,” released May 10–11, 2024.(allin.onpodcastai.com) Multiple episode listings and summaries confirm this as his post-December-2023 guest appearance.
• The gap from December 1, 2023 to May 10, 2024 is about 5½ months (roughly 23 weeks), far longer than what is normally meant by “the coming weeks” or “within a few weeks.” Since the prediction explicitly constrained the timing to that short window, it was not met even though Altman did eventually appear on the show.

Therefore, the prediction that Sam Altman would appear as a guest on a future All-In episode within a few weeks of the December 1, 2023 episode is wrong.