- Sam Altman joined a select group of high-profile tech execs this week.
- The OpenAI CEO was ousted from his position – then returned to the company just four days later.
- Apple’s Steve Jobs and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey made similar comebacks at the companies they founded.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman joined a select group of tech execs this week.
The ChatGPT developer fired its CEO Friday, saying he “hadn’t been consistently candid in his communications with the board” – then brought him back just four days later.
In between, Altman and fellow cofounder Greg Brockman briefly joined Microsoft, which had already poured over $13 billion into OpenAI, including a $10 billion investment made earlier this year.
The list of CEOs who, like Altman, have departed the companies they founded only to return at a later date is a short one.
Perhaps the most obvious example is Steve Jobs, who famously left Apple in 1985 after a boardroom struggle.
Jobs and John Sculley – who Jobs had lured away from PepsiCo to become Apple CEO two years earlier – tell different versions of that story, in a reminder that we might never know why OpenAI’s board decided to oust Altman.
Jobs has said publicly that he was fired after a boardroom rant, while Sculley’s line has been that the Apple cofounder quit after a showdown over the price of the company’s Macintosh PC.
Either way, Jobs exited – only to be brought back as CEO 12 years later, after Apple had paid $429 million to buy NeXT, the company he’d founded in the meantime.
Jobs then led Apple until August 2011, when he resigned on the grounds of ill health just two months before he died of complications from pancreatic cancer.
Travis Kalanick – who resigned from Uber due to growing pressure over the company’s corporate culture – was telling friends he was “planning on Steve Jobs-ing it” just months after his exit, according to a report from Recode. He’s yet to make that comeback.
While Jobs’ return paved the way for Apple’s growth into the nearly-$3 trillion company it is today, the example of Jack Dorsey at Twitter might serve as a more cautionary tale for Altman. If your company’s board is willing to get rid of you once, they’ll probably do it again.
Dorsey cofounded the social-media company in 2006 and was its CEO for two years, before being squeezed out of the role.
He returned as boss in 2015, leading the company until 2021 before announcing his departure after a longtime boardroom struggle with Elliott Management, the activist hedge fund led by billionaire investor Paul Singer.
Today, Dorsey heads up the digital payments firm Block, which he founded in 2009. He also holds a small stake in Twitter and this year has criticized the policies brought in by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
There are also plenty of examples of CEOs who made slightly less dramatic returns – including Bob Iger at Disney and Howard Schultz at Starbucks – as well as tech chiefs who left and never came back, including Uber’s Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann.
What’s different about Altman is the short amount of time he spent in the wilderness. Jobs took 12 years to make his comeback at Apple, whereas the OpenAI supremo was gone for just four days before the board reappointed him with 95% of employees threatening to quit.
In other words, Silicon Valley has never seen a comeback like this before.
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