In a weekend filled with more twists and turns than Succession, the saga of Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI unfolded like a rather dramatic and often ridiculous soap opera for the tech world. On Friday, Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder and board member of OpenAI, in a move reminiscent of a high-stakes thriller, informed Altman, the company’s CEO, that he was fired. Altman was told he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors and that they had lost confidence in his ability to run the company. In the tech world, this set off so many rumors it was hard to keep track.

By Saturday morning, after sifting through all the speculation, it became clear that Altman was likely pushed out, according to two people I spoke to close to the board, and reporting from other outlets, including The New York Times, because of safety concerns around the speed with which he was ushering the company into the AI future, and, what some feared was potentially an AI apocalypse. The board, after all, was not set up to pursue profits for OpenAI, but rather, to ensure the company didn’t destroy humanity. However, the drama didn’t end there. For a few hours, Altman and another cofounder Greg Brockman, who quit as president after Altman was fired, were in talks with venture firms to start a new AI company. Then the news shifted, to note that Altman was in talks to return to OpenAI as CEO. Then the board was called on to resign. Then the board wasn’t going to resign. Then Altman was not coming back as CEO. And in a final twist, Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, was appointed as interim CEO of OpenAI, and Altman is going off to Microsoft to run a new AI division—or, maybe returning to OpenAI?

For those of you following along at home who lost the plot of this bizarre story, I asked ChatGPT to summarize this into a haiku. “AI drama unfolds. CEO’s swift exit. Tech soap opera.” (Though, it should be noted, that ChatGPT still can’t accurately write a haiku, which should be 5, 7, and 5 syllables. This is 6, 6, and 5 syllables.) But beyond the drama and the AI poetry, what happened in Silicon Valley this weekend points to a much bigger problem with Silicon Valley, and the people who continue to populate it, which played out, where else, but on social media, specifically Twitter, or X, or the cesspool of the internet, or whatever it’s called these days.

During the saga, people were constantly tweeting their uninformed viewpoints on what was happening inside the boardroom of OpenAI. The panopticon of Twitter/X was so vividly clear when Altman emerged, tweeting a picture of himself wearing a guest pass at OpenAIs office, and saying: “first and last time I ever wear one of these.” Then an employee posted a picture of Altman tweeting the picture of himself. Reporters were stationed outside the building reporting what kind of food and drink was being delivered to the company’s headquarters (boba tea and McDonald’s in case you were wondering). Other employees were tweeting so many different colored heart emojis at each other that I didn’t actually know they came in that many colors. Through all of this, Silicon Valley mainstays like Marissa Mayer, Vinod Khosla, and Brian Chesky lay tweets at the feet of Altman, praising him like a deity and arguing for the board to reinstate him as the rightful CEO. Then, just when you didn’t think it could get more dramatic, 500 of the 770 employees at OpenAI signed a letter threatening to resign if the board did not quit… but wait… you won’t believe whose name was on the first page: Ilya Sutskever, the board member who fired Altman on Friday. Stutskever tweeted that he regretted his role in the firing. Which Altman retweeted with three heart emojis. (By Monday late-morning over 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees had now signed the open letter threatening to resign—I’m assuming the other 70 hadn’t woken up yet.)

But this past weekend's drama was inevitable. We’ve reached this point in society where people think they are experts at everything, even though they often don’t have much information about the topic they are experts on. They rush to social media to espouse how the world should operate. And the people who are the absolute worst at this, are the people who built the world we live in today: Silicon Valley. No one seemed to want to wait to find out exactly why Altman was fired, they just piled on, demanding this or that. Even now, after all the chaos, we still don’t know exactly what happened. While there are reports of Altman being fired for safety-related issues around AI, Shear, the new interim CEO, wrote that “The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.” 

It’s become clear over the past four days just how unclear it was why Altman was fired. Maybe Altman didn’t deserve to be ousted, and the board simply screwed up and did so for no apparent real reason—which would either be indicative of even bigger problems inside OpenAI, or a bigger problem with Altman’s relationship with the board—but in Silicon Valley, the titans of the industry seem to think waiting is not part of the solution to any problem. And this hasn’t stopped countless uninformed observers from decreeing how OpenAI should proceed, as if they have any idea of what truly happened.

In reality, all of this speaks to the larger problem with Silicon Valley itself. A problem that has been part of the culture there since its founding. The distinct cult of personality that envelops the star CEOs of the industry, elevating them to near-mythical status. This phenomenon, deeply entrenched in the tech industry’s ethos, isn’t just a matter of happenstance; it’s a reflection of a culture that idolizes innovation and disruptive thinking. Even reporters were bizarrely talking about how much they like Altman, rather than simply reporting on him. This glorification, however, obscures a more nuanced reality: These CEOs perpetuate that cult of personality. The narrative is now fueled by a media and industry culture that thrives on personalizing the impersonal, on finding a human face for complex corporate entities.

Eric Newcomer, the former Bloomberg reporter who now runs the Newcomer newsletter, had a very different take on Altman, one that others should have thought about if they weren’t so busy tweeting their largely ungrounded opinions. “Altman has a history of fractious corporate breakups,” Newcomer wrote. “People need to reflect on Altman’s time at Y Combinator; the Anthropic co-founders’ decision to spin off from OpenAI; and his breakup with Elon Musk. These board members are not the first people to question Altman’s integrity. They’ve just done so in public.” Indeed, the reasons why Altman left Y Combinator are still vague, Musk has said he doesn’t agree with the direction Altman took OpenAI (which the two men helped cofound) and more than half a dozen of OpenAI’s top scientists left the company years ago to start Anthropic when they felt the direction OpenAI was heading under Altman could prove to be dangerous to society without the proper AI safety in mind.

As I reported in the October issue of Vanity Fair, Altman can be duplicitous in what he says publicly and what he does privately, such as telling regulators around the world that AI needs to be regulated, and then, behind the scenes, aggressively pressing the European Union to water down its AI Act, specifically to not classify OpenAI’s tools as “high risk,” which would reportedly have subjected the company to “stringent legal requirements including transparency, traceability, and human oversight.” According to The Verge, when Shear joined the OpenAI Slack, rather than greeting the new CEO who had nothing to do with Altman’s ouster, OpenAI employees responded with the “fuck you” emoji, which one X user noted, “Nice culture.” Geoffrey Irving, who is a safety researcher at DeepMind, which is owned by Google, tweeted on Monday that he had worked with Altman for two years at OpenAI, and that there is a side to his former boss that people should be very wary of. “He lied to me on various occasions,” Irving wrote, “was deceptive, manipulative, and worse to others, including my close friends.”

Meanwhile, as all this was playing out, none of the people who are so obsessed with praising the path forward for AI had anything to say about a startling new paper from Harvard Business School, which found that job postings in industries that are susceptible to being replaced by ChatGPT are down 14%, including writing, electronic engineering, and web development. As someone who has been reporting about this industry for two decades now, I’ve come to believe that this tendency to canonize tech leaders as infallible geniuses is the absolute worst part of Silicon Valley’s culture. Though figures like Altman have achieved success, anointing them visionary titans risks inflating their importance and distorting the truth. The Valley’s obsession with cults of personality wrongly suggests these CEOs possess superhuman brilliance, when in reality they are simply fallible humans running influential businesses. The more people who go on X and praise them as the anointed ones, the more they start to believe what they read about themselves in news outlets and on social media. Most importantly, this constant praise imbues the founders and CEOs with an air of unassailable authority with the media, the government, and the boards that are supposed to (but rarely ever do) evaluate and oversee them to ensure they’re doing the right thing. This cult of personality shields these CEOs from all kinds of accountability while their companies amass tremendous power over society, and, as we’ve seen with social media itself, often to its detriment.

This past weekend Silicon Valley was given a choice, to wait and find out why Altman was pushed out and if any of the board’s concerns were true, or to push forward as quickly as they can into the future—and they couldn’t even wait a couple of days to decide. All hail the new cult leader of Silicon Valley: Sam Altman.