the majority if the employees at openai joined after chatGPT launched, so it's not like there's some sense of nostalgia or forlorn distress for what they built

the majority if the employees at openai joined after chatGPT launched, so it's not like there's some sense of nostalgia or forlorn distress for what they built slowly changing. The stock comp (sorry, "PPUs"... which are a phantom stock plan lol) is also quite high (check levels.fyi) and would have been high 7 to low 8 figures for engineers if secondary/tender offers were made. I agree it's not that deep - they wanted to join a hypergrowth startup, build cool stuff, and get paid. If someone is rocking the boat, you throw them off the boat. No mission alignment needed! :)