Huang eschewed drama and led by example, driving himself hard, refraining from gossip, and carefully apportioning credit for good work. If a product was going to be late or if LSI couldn’t deliver on some promised function, Huang would immediately provide a detailed description of what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and what he was doing to fix it.

“When he said he was going to do something, there was a reasonable likelihood that he would actually do it, y’know?” Malachowsky said. Malachowsky struggled to think of other Silicon Valley product managers who fit that description.

If Huang had a flaw, it was that he embraced candor in the extreme, sometimes crossing into the territory of insult. The bluntness was part of his charm, of course, but it could leave people’s feelings hurt. He didn’t have much patience for people who disagreed with him, and he also seemed genuinely surprised that there were people working in his industry who didn’t want to spend fourteen hours a day fiddling with the circuit simulator. Of course, for quarrelsome workaholics like Priem and Malachowsky, these traits were only further evidence of Jensen’s managerial fitness.

Murati elaborated: Altman was an incredibly anxious person. And when he felt anxious, he had dumb ideas, particularly when enabled by Brockman. Altman’s anxiety also fed into toxic behaviors that always followed the same playbook: To anyone resisting his decisions, he would say whatever he thought they wanted to hear to win their support; then, when he lost patience waiting and believed they would continue to go against him, he would undermine their credibility until they got out of the way. It was subtle but pervasive, and had most recently manifested with the issue between Sutskever and Pachocki. It had been extremely damaging and had left Sutskever very upset, she said.

Toner responded: The board would focus on the things that it could actually change—not Sam’s personality or behavior but instituting better governance processes and structures to keep him in check.

This aligned with what Murati had been trying to do within the company. She had just one more word of caution for Toner. “Make sure your information isn’t just coming from Sam,” she said.

The independent directors laid out what they knew: This was not the first time that senior leaders had described Altman in this way. In total, the three of them had heard similar feedback from at least seven people within one to two levels of Altman, inclusive of Sutskever, Murati, and Amodei, who oversaw safety and nonsafety parts of the company. Several had described Altman’s behaviors as abuse and manipulation; most had highlighted his lack of honesty and their inability to trust what he said. Then there were the myriad other issues that the independent directors themselves had found, including the disempowerment of the nonprofit; Altman not disclosing his legal ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund; Altman neglecting to mention Microsoft’s DSB breach; Altman trying to force D’Angelo and now apparently Toner off the board.

There was, as Sutskever had mentioned, no particularly damning evidence, but an accumulation of many instances of Altman saying different things to different people and stoking intense frustration across management. The screenshots showed at least two more senior leaders, both nonsafety and outside of the seven that the directors were already aware of, noting Altman’s tendency to skirt and ignore processes, whether instituted for AI safety reasons or to smooth company operations. This included, the directors learned, Altman’s apparent attempt to skip DSB review for GPT-4 Turbo by misquoting the legal team to Murati.