Welcome to another bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. This is sort of a service journalism sort of bonus episode because as you all know, I took most of last week off and who knew that it was going to be the busiest news week of the Tech calendar last week. I felt bad because obviously I was doing Thanksgiving things. I feel like I sort of left y'all hanging in terms of the chronology, the TikTok of what actually ended up happening with the
Sam Altman Saga. So I reached out to Alex Konrad from Forbes to literally just jump on with me and let's go through the timeline so that I don't feel like I dropped the ball. I feel like at least you all have an understanding of what happened. So Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. That was, you know what, the thing that weekend reminded me of was the whole Silicon Valley Bank weekend, right? Where all the sudden things were crazy and then almost
by Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, everything was fixed and it was over. But crazy, crazy what, four or five days? Yeah, it was basically five days, four or mostly to get the resolution because we kind of had answers early Wednesday morning, late Tuesday night, if like me, you know, you were working in the small hours of the morning. So again, I just want to do the
chronology to make sure that we didn't drop anything. So let's start in the way back with the idea that as we know, open AI was originally a nonprofit, sort of a Switzerland of AI development that then because there's so much capital needed to develop AI technology created a for-profit arm. But the for-profit arm was underneath the nonprofit, which was controlled by a board of directors. Do we know, I mean, one of the things and you can address this right now where
we can get into it later, the board was bigger until recently. Like, who was it? A LinkedIn guy was on there. There was a bunch of people on there that left and then it became the smaller board recently. What do we know about the composition of the board and what they maybe saw their role was? Yeah. So the board had dropped a lot in 2023. You'd had three people leave earlier in the year, kind of one at a time. And it got a little bit of coverage, but it
wasn't like that added up to a red alert that anyone was talking about publicly. I don't even think Sam Altman necessarily saw it as a red alert. When Reed Hoffman left, it was what we were told was it was because he was invested in a competitor or something. It wasn't like they were cleaning house on the board, right? It was it was each one had a different reason. So you had Reed Hoffman leave because he wanted to invest more in startups
that might be competing with open AI. And open AI was getting more and more interwoven in the startup ecosystem, looking to do its own startup investments. You would say I'm all been doing his own startup investments. Open AI was expanding its products like it had its developer day early in the month. And so I think it was getting very difficult for Reed to be on the board of the nonprofit and also be at Greylock, which was trying to
be and is still trying to be a very active AI startup investor. So that's why Reed stepped down. Then you had Chai Vom Zillis, who is at Nurelink and is closely tied to Elon Musk. She carried several of his children by surrogate, that made headlines. And she had been part of sort of the Elon AI team. Obviously for the audience who don't know, Elon was
there at the beginning of open AI as well. Styles himself as a co-founder helped see some of the capital and then left when he said, hey, let me run this thing and they did not agree to that. And he's tweeted or posted whatever you want to say, a ton about that if anyone's interested. But so Chai Vom leaves as Elon is thinking about starting his own
rival AI service, XAI. So she's gone. And then you have a third person on this guy will heard who was a congressperson from Texas, who wanted to run for president in the Republican ticket and his campaign has already ended and ended before this controversy earlier this fall. So short-lived presidential campaign, but got him off the board. So that almost suggests this was almost accidental that like in a way, this was just a
trition that maybe they weren't on top of like reconstituting the board. Number one, is that what it feels like? And then number two, did that almost leave sort of a rump on the board that had different interests than maybe the business side and Sam Altman had? So this started to come out through some of the more in-depth retrospective reporting that came out like the Atlantic did a nice piece, Bloomberg did a piece where they looked
at sort of what had happened in those months. We looked at just sort of the, at Forbes, the potential ties of the current board and I'm happy to talk about who was on that current board or at least board until last week. But with these people, it was like there was this drip, drip, drip and then the reporting basically is that people were arguing over the summer about who should be replacements. So there wasn't consensus on how to refill
those positions. It was punted down the road. That happens a lot and it doesn't lead to catastrophe, but in this standpoint, it led to a small board suddenly having more influence while there was the impasse. So that extant small board, again, because it was this mix of folks in the valley that are business focused and folks that are maybe philosophically focused or research focused or whatever, that accidentally, you can speak
to who was remaining on the board. Was it almost accidental that there were folks, the remaining board was more leaning towards the, let's be cautious, let's not go too fast into monetizing and things like that. Is that sort of where we found ourselves two weeks ago? Yeah, the people who were left, there were basically, there were a couple of open AI people. So the remaining founders of Sam Altman, of course, his president Greg
Brockman, who was also chairman of the board until that Friday, two Fridays ago. And then you had Ilya Setskiver, who was the chief scientist co-founder, that they were kind of the employee side. Then you had Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, and former CTO of Facebook. And he was kind of the only active, independent CEO, active CEO. Then you had a couple people who were coming more from the policy side. So Helen Toner and Tasha McAulay, Tasha had
been the founder of startups in the past. Helen is at Georgetown working on AI safety policy. And they were kind of there coming more from this academic or safety perspective. They also were on another board or sort of policy group together thinking about this stuff. So they were definitely coming from maybe outside that active Silicon Valley operator camp.
So to get us into the timeline now, one of the things that I read in early reporting was that it was that demo day from earlier in the month when a bunch of products were announced and clearly they were moving forward, full speed ahead in terms of developing new products and things like that. And the early reporting suggested that that board that was almost like the last straw because they were already thinking things were moving
too fast. There's been reporting also that like the whole launch of chat GBT sort of was a surprise to certain people in terms of wait, are we ready for this and things like that. So is the understanding now that this reached ahead because of the demo day and or I mean, I guess we should start to talk about like what the board has really never told us, which is to the degree that they had lost confidence and or trust in
Sam Altman as CEO. Yeah, we could take that in different directions. All wind back to a year ago when chat GBT went nuts over the holiday season. It did take open AI by surprise. We had one of the first interviews as Sam Altman kind of during that craze early this year, you know, so about 10 months ago. And he and Greg Rockman told me at the time that they really didn't anticipate chat GBT being such a big hit. They thought GBT 4 would
be the real, you know, aha, eureka moment for most people. And opening AI thought about maybe not even releasing chat GBT, at least the way that it was. So no one here really anticipated the lightning in a bottle moment that would happen about a year ago and kind of the crazy months since. And so there, there have been a couple really good accounts to
sort of how open AI handled that. I know like multiple books are being written about this, not by me sadly, but I think the consensus opinion from this great reporting and from sort of the other accounts is that, you know, open AI like a lot of startups scrambled to take advantage of this crazy opportunity they had and these technological breakthroughs they
were happening. And then at the same time, you know, you have this research arm and sort of these kind of non corporate types who are like, wait a second, what the hell is going on, right? So actually, you could argue that the like there was kind of warning signs for this along the way. It's just that everything was moving so fast that none of us were really like focused on that. Life doesn't happen by weekly. So why should pay day? The money you earn can be in your
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Mirror boards are free. When you sign up today at mirror.com slash podcast, that's three free boards at mIR.com slash podcast. So as best we can understand, by the way, I have a great literary agent if you want to shop a book. Apparently the board has been thinking we're moving too fast. Maybe we need to put the brakes on this. I did a story like the week before that even saying that the board was even tasked with if AGI actually happened, they were going, within their purview
to shut down the for-profit arm. Once AGI was developed, then you don't need the for-profit anymore because this was the goal of the enterprise to begin with. The move on, November 17th, so that Friday, they basically do a Zoom with Sam and say, by the way, you're out. What do we know at this point? Google me. Google, I'm sorry. Which became a meme because it wasn't a Microsoft Teams. Microsoft bought 49% of the for-profit company has given billions of dollars to OpenAI and yet OpenAI could
not be bothered. In that period of time when supposedly Microsoft was going to hire everybody, I read one of the things that they said is you don't even have to use Teams or maybe that was a joke. Mark Benioff also was tweeting, like, OpenAI employees, come to Salesforce. You can use whatever tool you like. Basically, this call is those first hours, everyone was like, there has to be something really bad here because Sam Altman was just within hours
giving interviews to various players. He had no idea this was coming. At this point, what do we know about the role that Ilya Susgavir played in this? If the board has decided they want Sam out, it feels to me now in retrospect reading the timeline again that Ilya was sort of like the muscle that they brought in to make this coup happen? If you look at these people, Greg Brockman, I think, is the Jim Rat of the group. Ilya is not going to usually be called muscle, but mentally.
I think if you look back to July, OpenAI published a blog post where they announced that Ilya was going to be co-leading an effort along something called super alignment. They said that OpenAI would be dedicating as much as 20% of its compute to this project. Basically, what it means in layman's terms is, in effort to understand how we would be training and correcting and supervising an AI, once it became smarter than us, how would humans maintain
some sort of reigns when they are no longer a mental horsepower? Ilya was already thinking about this a lot starting in the summer. I think from a credibility standpoint, he was the technical lead and the co-founder with sort of the most architectural kind of tech architecture side experience here. If anyone on the board, he was the one who would know what they were building that might be concerning and would have maybe the credibility to tell
Sam you're out. If it had been driven by a policy person, that would have been very different. It was Ilya, it's our understanding, who basically pulled the trigger on the Friday. Without him, none of this happens. Essentially, even though he eventually backtracks on this, he was on board with the coup if we're going to call it that in
Berdykamas initially. It's our understanding that you had these two people, Helen Toner and Toshra McCauley, Adam D'Angelo, and then you had Ilya as kind of the four who were like, you're out. Sam had Gregg's vote by proxy, but Sam wasn't given a vote. So, it looked like it was four to zero in that situation. That was the first sign that this wasn't like, oh, there's a scandal here. The first sign that this was something else was when Greg Brockman says he's quitting because Sam has been fired.
Okay, so again, I'm gonna jump into the timeline. We don't have to necessarily jump on any of these pieces, but like, so then Miriam Arati is the interim CEO, named as the interim CEO by the board. Last what, 24 hours, less than that? Yeah, I think it was like 48 hours, something like that. But Miriam, to be clear, Miriam didn't speak out publicly against Sam. She was even by, even by 24 hours later, she was sending hearts on Twitter.
And reportedly, pretty much right away was trying to negotiate for Sam and Greg to come back. So it's very unclear if Miriam was ever really... Right, on board. On the anti-Sam team. And also, wasn't she one of the first ones that says to the board, okay, so why was he fired and the board does not give her an answer? Right, so one thing I did is I spoke to some of the leading comps folks in Silicon Valley, as this is unfolding, to be like, what the heck is going on with the messaging here?
Because it was really weird. From the initial press release, the OpenAI issued that sort of market closed on Friday. It sounded like maybe it was personal misconduct or something. Like maybe saying he did not communicate enough with the board. Right, you from the start.
Right, that's funny, because again, this is a little inside baseball, but all of us behind the scenes are saying, well, he's not being upfront or something or candor, whatever the term was, and we're all thinking, okay, there's a personal scandal, there's financial something, something, something, right? And so, right, those first hours, that's what we were all waiting for. And then if it was like, okay, there was also rumors maybe OpenAI is running out of cash.
Maybe he's offered some insane deal to a potential new partner that upset everybody. Maybe Microsoft's upset, who knows? But that narrative wasn't really alluded to at all in the public statement. And then when Greg Brockman, as you noted, resigns and sides with Sam, it's sort of like, okay, well, what would be big enough to push out Sam, but isn't necessarily big enough that Greg would, would inside with him, right?
And so, we were all kind of left grasping for straws there because it didn't make sense. And I think Mira and a lot of people in OpenAI felt the same way. They were like, what the hell is going on? Well, and then the other crazy bit about this is, is again, Microsoft not being given the heads up on this. So like, even if you were trying to do a coup for real, you would line up your, I mean, I guess they could assume that Microsoft was on Sam's side unless there was something really, really bad.
But the fact that you blindside Microsoft, almost to me looking back on this now, that dooms it because Microsoft is going to, Microsoft's end game, and we can talk about this later, they don't want to absorb OpenAI, they don't want to hire everyone from OpenAI,
somebody smarter than me wrote about this week, about how if they can basically control OpenAI, but it's not theirs so that their fingerprints aren't on the bad stuff and they can take credit for all the good stuff, that's the best case scenario. So to me, this was doomed from the beginning, for various reasons, obviously the employees wanted to go with Sam, but also the fact that Microsoft was blindsided by this and probably never wanted it, made it doomed from the beginning.
Do you agree you look skeptical? If they had felt they had a smoking gun against Sam Altman and done a real investigation, they could have then told investors and partners, hey, we're doing this and Sam probably would have had a heads up and had a chance to defend himself as well, right? Like a serious board proceeding.
The fact that none of that had clearly happened suggested that something else was going on and definitely suggested maybe a weaker or more tenuous position by the anti-Sam camp, right? Like if they felt that the more people who know the less likely we are to succeed, that's not a great vote of confidence in your position. Right. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to the timeline now. This would be the Saturday, what would that be?
The 18th, so then all of a sudden, it immediately the rumors come out that maybe the board is in discussions with Sam to come back. Maybe Sam and Greg Brockman are pitching a new AI start-up to investors. The whole idea then that a memo comes out that it wasn't due to malfeasance or related financials. So by Saturday, we know that this is sort of a power play. I keep using the word coup, maybe that's unfair to the board.
Then there's also, the board is shopping around to other potential CEOs, certain people turn it down. At this point, I guess, you know, such a, and Microsoft are in touch with Sam right away. By Saturday and Sunday, definitely. The moves are being made in the background to try to, if defenestrate is a word, then refenestrate, Sam. And with Microsoft's backing, with other investors backing. So is it almost immediate that people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's roll this back.
Yeah, I think I might have been the first to call it a counter-coup online. There was momentum for a counter-coup right away. I think the executives of OpenAI asked for the board to give the smoking gun evidence to show why they did what they did. They did not receive that. And I think pretty much right away, they're not happy with the decision. We have people like Maraudi and others trying to figure out how to get the leadership back.
At the same time, those investors that didn't get any advance mourning, which was a story, we broke on the Friday. By Saturday, we wrote a story of fours about how they were trying to figure out their options. They didn't obviously have any direct board control or any clear leverage, but they were on the side of the employees who were agitating. They were on the side of Microsoft, which was pissed off. And so there's this kind of alignment or alliance of three camps here who all want Sam back.
And the board gets increasingly isolated. Right, because to me, I don't know if this is Saturday or Sunday, but the nuclear play was when, that open letter that's signed by 95% of open-air eyes employees say, we're out of here unless you bring Sam back. That's Sunday night. So Saturday night, there was the night of the hearts. Right, if you remember this. The emoji hearts. So late Saturday night into Sunday, all these open-air employees start sharing a Sam Altman tweet with hearts on it.
And that was them raising their hands. And then about 24 hours later, Sunday night into Monday morning, you get a letter that is even more drastic and open-mother. So do you agree with me that that is the point where it's like, well, this is over? Because and Microsoft hasn't even announced that they're hiring Sam yet, but it's clear that like, open-air could not be a going concern by Monday if the entire staff is like, we out, right?
You know, was that sort of the tipping point that's like, well, bored, you've lost, it's now just a matter of what you can negotiate on your way to bring this to a reversal? I don't think it was over yet. Okay, I think that there was a real chance on Sunday that someone who has a lot of credibility says, yes, maybe to the interim CEO job. At the same time, Sam says, you know what, I just want to do a new startup after all. And I don't want to come back even if it's offered to me.
Yeah, that was interesting. Because this is like, he has been burned. And this is an opportunity to not have this weird half and half structure. Just be like, I've already proven that this is the how to start up of this AI moment. Like, I'll just go over here and not have to deal with any of this headache and just do a new thing. So do you have any idea as to why he wasn't meanable to coming back to open AI?
Yeah, so speaking to people who were around Sam at the time, my understanding was that he a wanted the best outcome for advancing the technology as fast as possible. And I think going to do your own startup, you have the control to do that, but you do waste a lot of time getting back to where you were. He could have maybe used open source models or tried to speedrun what he'd already done, but you do lose time with that.
And then too, it becomes a lot of collateral damage for what you've already built in your employees. And I do think that he felt a sense of responsibility to have as good an outcome as possible for the general staff. So I think it ended up not being his top priority. Like I want to go do a startup, but I think it was something that if open AI had somehow been able to stay the course and keep its employees, he was very prepared to go do the new thing.
But I think, but then of course, option three developed Sunday night where you've sought the end of Delas, say Sam and Greg are going to join Microsoft and all the employees who want can come with them, which was a curve fall that I didn't necessarily make sure. I had heard that that was almost like because the market is opening on Monday morning, like we've got to say something. So like it was almost a placeholder sort of announcement that like, okay, don't worry.
One way or another, Microsoft, we've invested $11 billion in this. So before the market's open, we're gonna let the markets know that, hey, one way or another, we're gonna come out of this with something tangible. But do you feel like that that hiring them away was realer than that? You know, I don't know exactly how close that came together. It certainly felt like Microsoft overstated and then had to kind of walk it back a bit.
Because my understanding at the time was always that Sam was gonna go do a new thing, a new startup. If he didn't do the open AI, like go back to open AI. And so when it was like Sam's gonna be a unit lead of Microsoft, I could kind of talk myself into it with what we just discussed about. Maybe it would save him time. Like if you're gonna recreate what you did, you can Microsoft will just throw all the resources at you and you'll be able to do it faster.
But it was hard to picture Sam as like a vice president of Microsoft or whatever, right? Like even if it was an autonomous unit. So I hear what you're saying about it being kind of more like Microsoft trying to play Kate people. I think Microsoft was also trying to play Kate themselves. Like they were like, hey, we need to feel good about this. But then you have Satya do this like press tour on Monday night where suddenly he's really walking back his own position.
Yeah. So let me wedge in here real quick. Ilya Susgavor basically flipping. So he joins that letter that we talked about that all of the employees sign saying we went Sam back. Is there any, can you tell me anything about that? Like why the flip like was their pressure applied? What do we know what he saw that was like, all right, this is not working out or did he have legitimate regrets? I maybe I should give him more credit than that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, what it's been reported was that, I think it was the Wall Street Journal reported that Greg Brockman's wife confronts Ilya in the lobby of Open AI. As they basically reached another low point of Sam is not coming back on, you know, towards the end of the day on Sunday. And Ilya had married them in the Open AI office years ago. They're obviously very close. And so there was this like personal appeal. This is all very Shakespearean at this point.
And I also think, you know, from the reporting and from talking to folks that, you know, Ilya is swayed by the employees who are upset that there aren't specifics like, hey, if this was a general concern about safety or advancements that have been made, this was not the way to tackle that or handle that. You know, this, this immuno self-imulation is not the answer. Right.
And like, if there's no smoking gun, if you can't point to look at this bad thing that Sam did, we've always known, since we joined, I'm speaking for the employees, since we joined this company that it is a sort of debate between moving too fast, you know, moving with caution, being thoughtful about how this technology develops.
So if you blew up the company because you felt like things were moving too fast or well, we've always known that and you never, there was no chance to like, have that debate, it was just like, shut it down. Well, also, you know, as I mentioned, Ilya is in charge of this super alignment group and there is at least effort to be trying to think about safety.
And so if you feel like that has gone to the back seat and things are moving too fast, maybe that's something to deal with in-house, you know, the idea that Sam was a dictator who could not be reached or reasoned with is disturbing if Ilya really thought that but it seems like then maybe he changed his mind. Okay, I'm gonna speed through this. So Monday is when the announce, okay, they're gonna go into Microsoft, Tuesday.
And for the record on Monday, you know, what we were writing about, I mean, I was writing about how over 95% of employees signed this thing. It was almost unanimous and not only that, but a lot of visa holders, we're gonna put their residents into jeopardy and start a clock where they had 60 days if they quit OpenAI to figure out, you know, their status or get deported.
That was all happening on Monday while you also have Sozia being like, oh, maybe he's not joining Microsoft but he'll still be working with us in some capacity. Ha, ha, ha. So yeah. Miro is great for strategy development. The strategy development process typically involves collaboration, brainstorming, analysis and discussion to create a strategic plan that guides an organization towards its desired outcomes.
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What is the resolution here? Does the board basically follow on their swords, say that this isn't gonna work? Let's find a way to bring Sam back. Like what is the resolution where the board is like, okay, he comes back, but I believe at least at this point Sam and Greg Brockman are not returning to the board and things like that. So what was the negotiation that the board wanted to get to basically step aside?
Yeah, so we had multiple efforts and snags where basically starting Sunday, it's like what are the terms of surrender or what would the countercude terms look like? I think there were a bunch of complicating factors. You have a board that just fired a CEO and they wanna protect themselves in terms of what are the terms by which we bring this person back and don't open ourselves to liability for what we did on what we didn't set on Friday.
You also have the question of what Sam and Greg immediately be back on the board, what they say on the board. It's not like these people who just did something out of principle, even if you disagree with the principle, if they did it knowing that it wouldn't be popular, they're not just gonna immediately reverse course without thinking it through. And once they let go of power, they're not getting it back, unlike Sam Altman.
So I think the board was really thinking like, this is our one chance to really influence how things go. And their first step was actually to try to bring in the interim CEO and it's here overnight on Sunday as well. There were multiple people that were CEOs at some point, it was like that sort of revolving chairs sort of. I've been CEO for six hours or whatever you know. Yeah, I saw someone tweet a funny thing, like it was like the new defense against the dark arts role at Hogwarts.
But Emmett Sheer also reportedly was like, I wanna see the smoking gun, I wanna investigate what happened here. He doesn't get a good answer either. So he's also now like, let's figure out a way to bring Sam back. And finally, where this is all reaching a crescendo is just what would be the ground rules by which Sam could come back, the board could save face a little bit and protect themselves and we would move forward. And what that happened before Thanksgiving to save people like me. Right.
And also the employees and also everyone who uses open AI. Okay, let me just throw a bunch of individual questions at you. There subsequently this thing about the queue, asterix or queue or whatever. A story came out around Thanksgiving that one of the reasons the board jumped when they did was because there was some sort of new breakthrough in AI that happened that spooked them and was like, wow, we gotta apply the brakes. I feel like that has sort of been walked back by a bunch of places.
Do we know where we stand on that? Was there some sort of breakthrough that we're gonna learn about in the coming months or something that is like, oh yeah, this is why this happened? Yeah, you know, at first we were, again, we were looking for that smoking gun. And so there was talk about this queue star approach to training that basically would allow the model to do math and hadn't seen before.
I think Reuters might have been first, but there were a couple people who had this story that that was a big, oh snap moment because you know, models, it implied that the models were reasoning in a way to actually puzzle through something they hadn't seen before. Getting closer to the AI, like doing actual thinking as opposed to pattern matching, like LLMs are sort of doing. Yeah, moving away from hot dog, not hot dog too. What is a hot dog sandwich? Like, you know, actually thinking.
And so that was the narrative that I think people really wanted as well because it helped explain things. I don't think it's quite that neat. It doesn't seem like there was necessarily one, aha moment.
You know, I think the answer is kind of unsatisfying for people right now to the latest reporting that might have been one of a few things that did lead to this position, but that ironically maybe what the board said in that unsatisfying message that kicked the whole thing off that Sam wasn't communicating with the board kind of doesn't capsulate a few instances that they were upset, which is insane, but maybe the answer.
It feels like things are moving so fast that this is an organization that a lot of people, even Sam, or you know, doesn't have their finger on what exactly is evolving in real time. Okay, so I wanna do three more, you know, individual questions, and then I wanna talk about one other story unrelated to this that you did recently that I haven't even talked about, but okay, number one, Sam, do you feel like Sam Altman is happy with the outcome as it exists as we record this on November 29th?
I think Sam and Satya would both rewind the clock and not have to go through this if they could do it over again. If so. I don't subscribe to the idea that this was like the best thing to happen to Sam or that he would like do this again, given the outcome. I do think the outcome ended up about as favorable to Sam as possible.
But I think that he would rather have that nonprofit aligned with him, people who supported him, he would rather have a bigger board that was already backing him and have the cult-like love of his employees. I think he, if that were the Satya's quote Friday morning, I think that's preferable to going through the next five days. But in essence, he has that all back, do you agree?
Kind of, he has a lot of it back, but this new temporary board with Larry Summers and Brett Taylor is going to have to pick more permanent board directors and that could be a fight. It's unclear if Sam will end up a board director. I think it's likely personally, but it's still to be determined. And this group is supposed to look into what Sam was doing and provide a little more accountability or some sort of a third party report on what the heck just happened.
Again, you could say maybe it's their predisposed to say all good, in conclusion, Sam's back in charge, but it is a little bit more oversight, a little bit of uncertainty for Sam right now. Okay, number two, obviously again, Microsoft would have preferred that none of this had happened, but are they happy now? Because again, they had a chance maybe to bring the entire OpenAI team into Microsoft and gain $100 billion in market cap overnight or something.
Like, do you feel like that this is satisfactory to them that, okay, OpenAI still exists? We still control it essentially. And let's just forget that whole week happened. I think that Microsoft is happy with this outcome because I don't think they wanted to control OpenAI directly. I do agree with others who have reported that they wanted to keep it at ARMS length. It's much better to be a proxy state of Microsoft than be part of Microsoft.
A lot, you can spend a lot more money without your own shareholders complaining. Look at alphabet and how Google has to contort things to basically still take risky bets without it seeming to undermine the Google core business. I think it's better for them to have OpenAI kind of doing what it's going to do at ARMS length there. I also think from a potential control standpoint, you don't want added antitrust scrutiny, you don't want tension with your own AI teams who already existed.
And you know, there were reports that Microsoft was trying to look for alternatives or go beyond just depending on OpenAI for all these tools. And so it would have created weird vendor locking issues as well if OpenAI had become a pure Microsoft shop. So I actually think, again, Microsoft did a preferred stability and none of this ever happening. But this outcome is better than Sam joining Microsoft.
All right, third and final on this topic, let's imagine that you are somebody and there are a lot of people in the AI community that are concerned of the risks and alignment and things like that. If you are one of those partisans on that side of this debate, has this been a disaster? Has your cause of maybe things are moving too fast, maybe we need to pause, maybe we need to slow down? Has this whole drama sort of hurt your cause? Nightmare, total nightmare.
I think it was a case of the optics almost mattering more than the substance. And yes, I think that unfortunately, for folks on the safety side or sort of the pro-regulation side, it was very easy to smear this move as a doomer move or a deceleration move to use some of the buzzwords of Tech Twitter today. And it made that camp look incompetent and out of touch. So yes, I think if you are on that side, this was a nightmare situation.
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Again, I actually haven't read the piece, haven't done the story. So I'm gonna give you, tell me about the story because I did wanna do it. So what is going on with, what is the name of the fund? Newlands. Newlands. What is Newlands? Yeah, it was great to be tipping tech meme something that was not open AI related. Yeah, I was really sick of that. And it was funny, the story really resonated.
And I don't know if it was just because it's a fun investigation or if we all were, or a lot of us were thirsty for like an interesting rabbit hole that had nothing to do with open AI, but as your palate cleanser, we found these filings were basically a fund was set up in 2021 in Texas, run by a former Sequoia partner, the co-head of its growth team who keeps a super low profile. And this fund is a ghost, almost no internet presence at all.
And yet we found filings that it owned almost $10 billion of public equities, mostly tech stocks alone, including almost $3 billion of meta, $1 billion of Tesla, so not investing of others. Not the majority of investments in private companies, these are in publicly traded stocks and equities. Well, yeah, so for the audience to understand like the filing is how we kind of got them that we know that they have over $9 billion, approaching $10 billion in public equities alone.
But we also know from talking to sources, hitting the phone that they're starting to invest in startups too. But they actively don't want people to know about the startup stuff. When we approached founders who had taken their money, the founders were being told not to talk to us.
So they're starting to make moves in the startup scene, but what they couldn't hide was this really unusually big public equities portfolio, which tells us that this is a heavy hitter, new hedge fund slash crossover firm. And what the sources told us was that it's almost all the yoncums money. So really unusual. Shoulder, one of the founders of what's it? Right, Forbes values him at $15 billion. He sold the company for $22 billion in 2014, but he also keeps a really low profile.
And for anyone who's like, is this a big deal? At least in my knowledge, it's the only time a successful tech founder has ever given multiple billions of dollars, let alone approaching $10 billion to another investor and said, start a firm with this. We've seen this maybe in the hedge fund world with finance billionaires, but this is an extremely unusual situation. So it's almost like this is Yon's family office. Do we understand, is he involved in the investment decision making?
So he is tagged on LinkedIn under a bearbone's profile called YonK as a QA testing person. So he's involved, but it's my understanding that he's not leaving the investment decisions. It's this also low profile ex-Sacoya guy named Michael Abramson, a couple of other investors he brought over. But we spoke to some experts in family offices, and they said that this didn't look like a family office. They said it looked more sophisticated, like a new hedge fund or a...
In Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company of some sort, yeah. There's a big firm called iconic in Silicon Valley, which manages the money of a lot of wealthy tech people. Maybe this could end up looking like that, but this is like a, it's an odd duck. It's not just a, not just a usual family office. I wouldn't get so excited writing about a generic family office. Well, and then is the suggestion here that they could be a new heavy hitter in private company investing?
Yeah, I think you're gonna see their name a lot more. They're trying to keep low profile, but if they have that much money to deploy in public equities, they have a big stack of chips also for startups. If and when they decide to deploy it more, they're already in the market quietly with startups. And so yeah, one of my predictions, an easy prediction would be that you start to see the more on CrunchBase and PitchBook or in fund raises that get put up on tech meme moving forward.
Well, all right, new lands. Putting that on my radar for things to look out for. Listen, I cannot thank you enough, not only for telling us about that, but like I said, answering the bat signal, Alex, to go through the timeline and you filled in a lot of the gaps that, even I wouldn't have been able to do, had I been able to do in real time.
So again, like the Silicon Valley bank story, I guess we wipe our hands and everything's back to the way it was, same as it ever was, but man, just a fascinating like week, crazy week. Crazy week, I think we took a branch of history where you won't see as much of a short term divergence as we might have, but I do think in the months and years to come, we will look back on this and see interesting fault lines or threads that developed, we just don't know them yet.
Well, especially because Brett Taylor, again, with the whole Elon connection, which Elon is against, yeah. Okay, Alex Conrad on Twitter, I'm not gonna call it X, but also read him or listen to me, quote him all the time, he writes for Forbes. Thank you, Alex. Thanks so much.