Yeah, but also remember that Altman and Musk started the non-profit to begin with (back when both their reputations were much different). They were explicitly concerned about Google's dominance in AI. It was always competitive, and always about power.
Wikipedia gives these names:
In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[15] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture
Do any of those people sound like their day job was running non-profits? Had any of them EVER worked at a non-profit?
---
So a pretty straightforward reading is that the business/profit-minded guys started the non-profit to lure the idealistic researchers in.
The non-profit thing was a feel-good ruse, a recruiting tool. Sutskever could have had any job he wanted at that point, after his breakthroughs in the field. He also didn't have to work, after his 3-person company was acquired by Google for $40M+.
I'm sure it's more nuanced than that, but it's silly to say that there was an idealistic and pure non-profit, and some business guys came in and ruined it. The motive was there all along.
Not to say I wouldn't have been fooled (I mean certainly employees got many benefits, which made it worth their time). But in retrospect it's naive to accept their help with funding and connections (e.g. OpenAI's first office was Stripe's office), and not think they wouldn't get paid back later.
VCs are very good at understanding the long game. Peter Thiel knows that most of the profits come after 10-15 years.
Altman can take no equity in OpenAI, because he's playing the long game. He knows it's just "physics" that he will get paid back later (and that seems to have already happened)
---
Anybody who's worked at a startup that became a successful company has seen this split. The early employees create a ton of value, but that value is only fully captured 10+ years down the road.
And when there are tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of value created, the hawks will circle.
It definitely happened at say Google. Early employees didn't capture the value they generated, while later employees rode the wave of the early success. (I was a middle-ish employee, neither early nor late)
So basically the early OpenAI employees created a ton of value, but they have no mechanism to capture the value, or perhaps control it in order to "benefit humanity".
From here on out, it's politics and money -- you can see that with the support of Microsoft's CEO, OpenAI investors, many peer CEOs from YC, weird laudatory tweets by Eric Schmidt, etc.
The awkward, poorly executed firing of the CEO seems like an obvious symptom of that. It's a last-ditch effort for control, when it's become obvious that the game is unfolding according to the normal rules of capitalism.
(Note: I'm not against making a profit, or non-profits. Just saying that the whole organizational structure was fishy/dishonest to begin with, and in retrospect it shouldn't be surprising it turned out this way.)