> If that one person's speculation is true, does the non-profit have an alignment problem, with employees who are doing the technical work -- that the employees are motivated more by individual financial situations, than by the non-profit's mission?
Yes, and moreover they've created a compensation structure which actively creates incentives that are contrary to the charity's mission.
This was probably the easiest way to attract talent that had high paying alternatives and weren't particularly interested in the charity's mission, but that was always a fundamental problem with choosing a for-profit entity with that kind of needs as the primary funding vehicle for the charity and also the primary means by which it would achieve research, etc., directed at its charitable purpose.
The problem -- taking OpenAI's stated charitable mission at face value [0] -- is that there was nowhere close to enough money available from people concerned with that mission to pay for it, and OpenAI's response was to go all-in on the most straightforward path of raising sufficient funds given what resources it had and what the market looked like without sufficiently considering the alignment of its fundraising mechanism with the purpose for which it was raising funds.
[0] which I should emphasize that I do for the sake of argument, not because I necessarily believe that it represents the genuine purposes of the people involved even initially.