Sam Altman named TIME’s 2023 CEO of the year

Sam Altman's Thanksgiving did not involve the usual trip back to St. Louis. Instead, fresh off the most chaotic boardroom coup in Silicon Valley history, the OpenAI cofounder hiked his Napa ranch, made vegetarian pasta, drank wine with his fiancé, and met up with one of the very board members who had fired and rehired him within five days.

Altman called it a ten-out-of-ten crazy thing to live through. Now, just weeks after surviving that corporate near-death experience, TIME named him its 2023 CEO of the Year.

The coup and the complex operator

On November 17, OpenAI's nonprofit board ousted Altman without warning, citing a lack of candor. What followed was pure mayhem: 700-plus employees threatening to walk, Microsoft preparing to hire the whole team, two interim CEOs cycling through, and a near-total collapse avoided only when the board backed down and overhauled itself.

While former Google boss Eric Schmidt compared him to Steve Jobs, TIME spoke with more than 20 colleagues who paint a far more nuanced picture.

Supporters call him an unmatched visionary who rallied top researchers toward artificial general intelligence. But several people who worked closely with him described him as slippery and skilled at manipulating people to consolidate control, often telling people what they wanted to hear.

Why it matters

TIME giving Altman CEO of the Year isn't just a nod to ChatGPT's explosive growth. It is a reflection of how completely he outmaneuvered the guardrails designed to keep him in check.

OpenAI was built on a holy promise: a nonprofit board with the power to hit the brakes and fire its chief executive if commercial pressures ever threatened humanity. Altman himself publicly praised that structure earlier this year. But when the board actually tried to use that power, the entire safety architecture melted down in days under pressure from capital and staff loyalty.

We think this whole saga revealed the real stakes behind frontier AI. Altman believes human-level AGI could arrive within the next four to five years, and everyone around him is playing for keeps because the window to steer the ship is closing. He won, but the myth that AI development can be self-governed by an idealistic board died with his return.