# Five days in November: the OpenAI boardroom drama

URL: https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/blog/five-days-in-november-the-openai-boardroom-drama
Published: 2026-10-09
Author: Roman Aglaganov, Full-stack developer
Category: Industry
Region: North America
Tags: safety

> In November 2023, OpenAI’s board fired chief executive Sam Altman. Within five days, Microsoft had hired him, nearly all the staff had threatened to quit, and he was back in charge.

![Typographic cover: November 2023, 5 days: fired, hired elsewhere, rehired](https://ai-pulse.aglaganova.com/api/media/file/openai-board-1.png)

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with an unusual structure: a board whose duty was to humanity, not shareholders, sitting above a for-profit company backed by billions from Microsoft. In November 2023, that structure was stress-tested in public.

## The timeline

**Friday 17 November:** the board fired Sam Altman, saying it no longer had confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI because he had not been “consistently candid” with it. Co-founder Greg Brockman quit in protest the same day.

**Sunday 19 November:** after a weekend of negotiations, the board named Emmett Shear, the former head of Twitch, as interim chief executive.

**Monday 20 November:** Microsoft announced it would hire Altman and Brockman to lead a new AI research team. Meanwhile, 745 of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter threatening to quit and follow him unless the board resigned.

**Wednesday 22 November:** Altman was reinstated as chief executive, with a new board chaired by Bret Taylor.

## What it revealed

The episode showed the tension at the heart of the AI industry: a mission framed around safety, and a business that needs to move fast to fund ever-larger models. When the people charged with the mission clashed with the people running the business, the business, and its employees and investors, won within a week.

OpenAI has since reorganised: in 2025 it converted its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation, still controlled by its nonprofit foundation. The Thanksgiving weekend of 2023 remains Silicon Valley’s favourite boardroom thriller.

## Sources

- [Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman_from_OpenAI)