How Silicon Valley reunited Sam Altman and OpenAI

When OpenAI announced Sam Altman’s return to the helm on Tuesday evening, an impromptu party broke out at the company’s San Francisco offices.

As staff celebrated the reinstatement of the co-founder who was dramatically sacked just four days earlier, investors in the company and other tech leaders rushed to offer their support to Altman, with a flood of heart emojis washing across social media site X.

“Congrats to OpenAI! Great to see the good guys win!” wrote Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. He was one of a number of influential figures in Silicon Valley’s tight-knit tech scene to offer public support, even though he had tried to poach OpenAI’s employees earlier in the crisis, with an offer to match their salaries.

Altman’s return was the culmination of days of feverish efforts, conducted largely remotely, by staff, financial backers and high-profile Silicon Valley figures to persuade a resolute board that they had made a catastrophic error in sacking the 38-year-old.

A mass revolt by OpenAI staff was the primary reason for the board’s about-face, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Many had expected Altman to return to the company on Sunday, encouraged by the appearance of their former boss in the office.

Altman made clear his reinstatement would require an overhaul of the board that had ousted him days earlier for not being “consistently candid”. They included Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder whose work focused on artificial intelligence research; Adam D’Angelo, chief executive of question-and-answer service Quora; technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

The directors initially held firm, appointing Emmett Shear, the co-founder of video-streaming service Twitch, as interim chief executive on Sunday night.

When Sutskever invited employees to an all-hands meeting to greet the new boss on the company’s internal messaging…