The week leading up to Thanksgiving 2023 was the AI industry’s biggest soap opera moment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly ousted from his role at the ChatGPT-maker. The explanation? That Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Now, via witness testimony and trial exhibits in Musk v. Altman, the public is getting a concrete look behind the scenes of that dramatic weekend for the first time, much of it centered on former CTO Mira Murati.
It was a unique situation in that the rollercoaster of a power play — which seemed to change every hour — took place, in many ways, publicly. The board’s strikingly vague blog post announcing Altman’s ouster was posted on OpenAI’s website, immediately sparking a laundry list of conspiracy theories bandied about on X. (It turned out that the impetus had allegedly been a pattern of lying or omission by Altman, whether about OpenAI’s safety processes, about his own ownership stake in OpenAI’s startup fund, or about the release of certain tools or features like ChatGPT.) Other OpenAI executives and AI industry leaders made public statements in support of Altman. An online campaign began among hundreds of OpenAI employees whether they posted a heart if they supported Altman’s reinstatement, and many posted the phrase, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Rumors swirled as countless onlookers waited with bated breath for any new kernel of information. (I covered the whole thing from a backpacking trip in Patagonia, armed with only an iPhone notes app (and no laptop).)
Throughout it all, one unassuming character seemed to be everywhere at once: OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. At first, she was made interim CEO, before immediately ceding the position to outsider Emmett Shear. Within days, Altman was back at the helm of the company, and the board that had come together to remove him was largely gone.
Murati had publicly supported Altman’s reinstatement and posted online in favor of him returning to his role at the company. But over time, reports surfaced that she had had a significant hand in his ouster. She had, by some accounts, more or less started the internal conversation about concerns surrounding Altman and funneled a significant amount of information — including screenshots, documentation of text messages, and allegations of mismanagement during Altman’s time at Y Combinator — to cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who then took his concerns to the OpenAI board in the form of a 52-page memo. In testimony this week, former board member Helen Toner said that Murati and Sutskever’s concerns had materially advanced the board’s own, relating to a pattern of deceit, Altman’s “resistance” of board oversight, and his “manipulation” of board processes and management problems.
On November 16, 2023, four members of OpenAI’s board of directors — Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’Angelo, and Tasha McCauley — unanimously signed a document terminating Altman’s employment with OpenAI and naming Murati the new interim CEO.
Though Murati had, by many accounts, played an integral part in the entire lead-up to Altman’s ouster, Murati almost immediately seemed to switch her support to Altman.
In 78 text messages exchanged over a 14-hour period, between Sunday early evening and Monday morning, Murati and Altman talked at length about whether his reinstatement would be possible and what would happen next. Altman said that D’Angelo, a board member, was “trying to get the board to agree to a configuration” but that Altman and Nadella had told D’Angelo that that “doesn’t work and that [they] need to start preparing for plan b.”
Around 2:30am on Monday morning, Altman asked, “can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious.”
Murati responded, “Directionally very bad. Sam this is very bad.”
Altman asked to join the meeting and Murati said the board didn’t want him to. Altman then texted, “what do you want to make it better? i’m still willing to just walk away if that helps. if they are ramped up for crazy lawsuits against me then i’m not sure what.”
Murati said the board was convinced of their decision for Altman to leave the company, adding, “They’ve walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can’t be ceo.”
Altman asked why the board, then, had been “saying all weekend they wanted me back.”
Murati responded, “They want to have a new ceo in place tonight (not me.”
Altman asked who, and Murati responded, “New guy is rando twitch guy,” referencing Shear.
Murati told Altman she was “hoping Satya can help undo this.”
Between November 17 and 20, Murati and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was squarely on Altman’s side during the conflict and had offered to hire every OpenAI employee over to Microsoft to work under Altman, also exchanged a number of text messages (largely one-sided, with Murati reaching out to Nadella). In one, Murati mentions that she’s “not putting [her] name on this,” seeming to reference a statement by the board issued that Sunday that “the board firmly stands by its decision as the only path to advance and defend the mission of OpenAI,” and that “put simply, Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do.”
Within days, more than 750 OpenAI employees signed a letter to OpenAI’s board, threatening to quit and join the new Microsoft subsidiary that would be led by Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
They wrote that “the process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company.”
The very first signatory on that letter? Murati herself.
One of the most interesting parts of the letter is near the end, when the signatories specifically note to the board that “within two days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati against the best interests of the company.”
But remember: Murati, apparently, had told the board that she didn’t want to serve as interim CEO unless the board was able to “legitimize” the decision, according to Toner’s testimony. Toner said Murati “did not seem to understand, either willfully or not, that she had a pivotal role to play in legitimizing this decision herself.”
“She was waiting to see which way the wind would blow, and she didn’t realize that she was the wind,” Toner said.
Toner also said that Murati had been “strikingly unsupportive” and “remarkably passive” after Altman’s removal, adding, “She seemed totally uninterested in telling her team that her conversations with us had been a significant factor in our decision to fire Sam.”
During the 78 text messages between Murati and Altman, Altman asked if it was time to send the board the letter from the employees; Murati told him it “wouldn’t matter” and that the board members “don’t care if everyone quits,” just that they didn’t want Altman’s “hand on agi.” Altman asked if D’Angelo knew that Murati had rehired Altman, and she said yes.
Early on the morning of Monday, November 20, Murati texted Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott that they were “close to having the board resign.” Scott responded, “For real this time?” Murati said, “It seems so. Ilya [Sutskever] signed our petition.”
Later that morning, Murati asked Nadella to “please make a public statement soon that shows support for the joint [OpenAI] team, basically bringing the team together? It’s very important that we don’t lose researchers to Demis or Elon.”
A little over a year before, in a document dated September 30, 2022, Murati had written a list of complaints about Altman and his management style that was apparently shared directly with him. She wrote that “constant panic around our projects, people, goals, etc generates chaos and churn,” and that “we talk about focus but in practice our approach is do-everything and do it fast because we constantly get pressure to change priorities and shuffle around people and projects.” She also wrote about Altman and the executive team’s misalignment about the importance of the applied AI team, and requested that Altman talk about his concerns with her directly: “I don’t want to find out from others …It’s a missed opportunity for us to resolve important issues for the company and it undermines the leadership of the company when you do this.”
Murati also mentioned, in that 2022 document, the idea that “doing what the users want is not in the DNA of OpenAI” — that the company’s top-cited goal was to generate $100 million in revenue, and that Altman’s position was that “it didn’t matter how we got to this number, we needed to get there.” Murati also said that one of the top proposed solutions for Altman to remedy these issues would be to “get informed” and use official channels to bring up proposed changes.
“Often I hear from you two things simultaneously, that to me seem in conflict: (1) We’re not moving fast enough or a particular area or person is failing & (2) You don’t know what’s going on, so you might be wrong,” she wrote in the 2022 document. “When unsure of how things are going or if there’s a feeling that things are not going well, go directly to Mira to get information and set up in-depth reviews until you are satisfied that you understand the situation.”
As part of Murati’s deposition played at the trial in Musk v. Altman this week, she said she stood by her criticisms of Altman and that her concerns were “completely management related … I had an incredibly hard job to do in an organization that was very complex. I was asking Sam to lead, and lead with clarity, and not undermine my ability to do my job.”
Murati may have not been present in the courtroom, but her testimony — and what was revealed in documentation — was among the most memorable.
