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.”