OpenAI just spent hundreds of millions on a podcast with 58,000 YouTube subscribers. Ben Thompson at Stratechery called the company "the short bus at the end of the rainbow," and he laid out how incoherent OpenAI's strategy has become. They were against ads until ads were the plan. Apple was a partner until OpenAI poached Jony Ive. Anthropic keeps shipping models while Sam Altman signs checks for a talk show. Investor sentiment toward OpenAI has soured as Anthropic equity gets bid up, signaling a growing concern about their consumer-focused approach compared to Anthropic's enterprise-first strategy. Joan Westenberg's new essay argues something that should be obvious but apparently isn't: sometimes powerful people just make bad decisions. Ego running unchecked, with nobody willing to push back.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Napoleon invaded Russia with 685,000 troops and no supply plan. His advisors warned him. He did it anyway, lost most of his army, and never recovered. Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion after waiving due diligence. A jury this year found him liable for misleading investors. The company lost 80% of its value. There was no hidden strategy. Just a billionaire used to being the smartest person in every room, with nobody willing to tell him no.
The November 2023 OpenAI board crisis fits the same mold. The board fired Sam Altman without notifying Microsoft, their biggest investor, and with no technical successor ready. Over 700 employees threatened to quit. They reinstated him days later. Ilya Sutskever, who voted to fire Altman, later expressed regret. Adam D'Angelo is the only board member from that decision who remains. Fragile egos and internal dysfunction nearly destroyed a company at the center of the AI industry.
Westenberg calls it the Hidden Plan Theory: the assumption that powerful people must have reasons we can't see. Sometimes they don't. When OpenAI executives told staff to stop chasing side quests and then the company bought a talk show, that's not strategy. That's a CEO doing what felt good in the moment. The boring explanation is usually the right one.