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.

With every team stretched dangerously thin, managers begged Altman for more head count. There was no shortage of candidates. After ChatGPT, the number of job applicants clamoring to join the rocket ship had rapidly multiplied. But Altman worried about what would happen to company culture and mission alignment if the company scaled up its staff too quickly. He believed firmly in maintaining a small staff and high talent density. “We are now in a position where it’s tempting to let the organization grow extremely large,” he had written in his 2020 vision memo, in reference to Microsoft’s investment. “We should try very hard to resist this—what has worked for us so far is being small, focused, high-trust, low-bullshit, and intense.

“The overhead of too many people and too much bureaucracy can easily kill great ideas or result in sclerosis. Unlike the big-iron engineering projects of the past, we could fulfill our mission with a surprisingly small number of great people.”

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.

The problem was that everything Altman did was always so subtle. Each act viewed in isolation didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was only when viewing it all at once that patterns snapped into focus. The takeaway was not Look at this bad incident where Ilya feels like he’s been wronged, he stressed. This was just the latest instance of Altman’s patterns of abuse. There was also his treatment of Amodei, with whom Toner should speak to, Sutskever urged. And there were the circulating allegations from his sister. “It’s a different kind of a safety issue, if you see what I mean,” he 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.