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It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like d

It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup. Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman. If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own it. It's the wresting of control from the actual owners in favor of a public facing executive.

pdntspa 3y ago
> voting out a politician as a coup. That6 is literally a political coup
username332211 3y ago
It's not uncommon to describe the fall of a government as a "parliamentary" coup, if the relevant proceedings of a legislative assembly are characterized by haste and intrigue, rather than debate and deliberation. For example, the French revolution saw 3 such events commonly descried as coups - the the fall of Robespierre on 9-th of Thermidor and the Directory's (technically legal) annulment of elections on the 18-th of Fructidor and 22-nd Floréal. The last one was even somewhat bloodless.
Barrin92 3y ago
Yup. The only correct governance metaphor here is the opposite. It's a defense of openAI's constitution. The company, effectively like Mozilla, was deliberately structured as a non-profit in which the for-profit arm exists to raise capital to pursue the mission of the former. Worth paying attention to what they have to say on their structure: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure especially this part: https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa069acada1/image1.png?trim=0,0,0,0&width=2000 https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...
crazygringo 3y ago
No, you're confusing business with politics. You're right that a literal coup d'état is the forced takeover of a state with the backing of its own military. But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.) This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation. I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.
- polishdude20 3y ago
  I think of it as more of a mutiny.
  - maxlamb 3y ago
    A mutiny is when the entire boat’s crew rebels at once, a coup is only when a few high-level powerful people remove the folks at the top.
    - polishdude20 3y ago
      I mean that's if you believe the "crew" is not just the board members.
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Your post is internally inconsistent. Defining a coup as "any takeover of power" is inconsistent with saying that firing Sam Altman is a coup. CEOs do not have and should not have any power vis-à-vis the board. It's right there in the name. Executives do not have any right to their position. They are an officer, i.e., an agent of the stakeholders. The idea that the executive is the holder of the power and it's a "coup" if they aren't allowed to remain is disgustingly reminiscent of Trumpian stop-the-steal rhetoric.
  - gfodor 3y ago
    All you’re saying here is that it’s never possible to characterize a board ousting a ceo as a coup. People do, because it’s a useful way to characterize when this happens in the way it did here vs many other ways that involve far less deception and so on.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    You're ignoring the rest of the definition I provided. I did not say it was "any takeover of power". Please read the definition I gave in full. And I am not referring to the CEO status of Altman at all. That's not the coup part. What I'm referring to is the fact that beyond his firing as CEO, he and the chairman were removed from their board seats, as a surprise planned and executed in secret. That's the coup. This is not a board firing a CEO who was bad at their job; this is two factions at the company where one orchestrates a total takeover of the other. That's a coup. Again, I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. I'm just saying, this is as clear-cut of a coup as there can be. This has nothing in common with the normal firing of a CEO accomplished out in the open. This is four board members removing the other two in secret. That's a coup if there ever was one.

pdntspa 3y ago

> voting out a politician as a coup. That6 is literally a political coup

username332211 3y ago

It's not uncommon to describe the fall of a government as a "parliamentary" coup, if the relevant proceedings of a legislative assembly are characterized by haste and intrigue, rather than debate and deliberation. For example, the French revolution saw 3 such events commonly descried as coups - the the fall of Robespierre on 9-th of Thermidor and the Directory's (technically legal) annulment of elections on the 18-th of Fructidor and 22-nd Floréal. The last one was even somewhat bloodless.

Barrin92 3y ago

Yup. The only correct governance metaphor here is the opposite. It's a defense of openAI's constitution. The company, effectively like Mozilla, was deliberately structured as a non-profit in which the for-profit arm exists to raise capital to pursue the mission of the former. Worth paying attention to what they have to say on their structure: https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure especially this part: https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa069acada1/image1.png?trim=0,0,0,0&width=2000 https://images.openai.com/blob/142770fb-3df2-45d9-9ee3-7aa06...

crazygringo 3y ago

No, you're confusing business with politics. You're right that a literal coup d'état is the forced takeover of a state with the backing of its own military. But in the business and wider world, a coup (without the d'état part) is, by analogy, any takeover of power that is secretly planned and executed as a surprise. (We can similarly talk about a company "declaring war" which means to compete by mobilizing all resources towards a single purposes, not to fire missiles and kill people.) This is absolutely a coup. It was an action planned by a subset of board members in secret, taken by a secret board meeting missing two of its members (including the chair), where not even Microsoft had any knowledge or say, despite their 49% investment in the for-profit corporation. I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong. But this is one of the great boardroom coups of all time -- one for the history books. There's a reason it's front-page news, not just on HN but in the NYT and WSJ as well.

polishdude20 3y ago
I think of it as more of a mutiny.
- maxlamb 3y ago
  A mutiny is when the entire boat’s crew rebels at once, a coup is only when a few high-level powerful people remove the folks at the top.
  - polishdude20 3y ago
    I mean that's if you believe the "crew" is not just the board members.
torstenvl 3y ago
Your post is internally inconsistent. Defining a coup as "any takeover of power" is inconsistent with saying that firing Sam Altman is a coup. CEOs do not have and should not have any power vis-à-vis the board. It's right there in the name. Executives do not have any right to their position. They are an officer, i.e., an agent of the stakeholders. The idea that the executive is the holder of the power and it's a "coup" if they aren't allowed to remain is disgustingly reminiscent of Trumpian stop-the-steal rhetoric.
- gfodor 3y ago
  All you’re saying here is that it’s never possible to characterize a board ousting a ceo as a coup. People do, because it’s a useful way to characterize when this happens in the way it did here vs many other ways that involve far less deception and so on.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  You're ignoring the rest of the definition I provided. I did not say it was "any takeover of power". Please read the definition I gave in full. And I am not referring to the CEO status of Altman at all. That's not the coup part. What I'm referring to is the fact that beyond his firing as CEO, he and the chairman were removed from their board seats, as a surprise planned and executed in secret. That's the coup. This is not a board firing a CEO who was bad at their job; this is two factions at the company where one orchestrates a total takeover of the other. That's a coup. Again, I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. I'm just saying, this is as clear-cut of a coup as there can be. This has nothing in common with the normal firing of a CEO accomplished out in the open. This is four board members removing the other two in secret. That's a coup if there ever was one.