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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I question that framing of a growing Altman influence.

Altman predates every other board member and was part of their selection.

As an alternative faming, Maybe this is the best opportunity the cautious/antripic faction would ever get and a "moment of weakness" for the Altman faction.

With the departure of Hoffman, Zilis, and Hurd, the current board was down 3 members, so the voting power of D’Angelo, Toner, McCauley was as high as it might ever be, and the best chance to outvote Altman and Brockman.

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Apparently Hoffman was kicked out by Sam, not just Musk: https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...

Maybe the remaining board members could see the writing on the wall and wanted to save their own seats (or maybe he did move to coup them first and they jumped faster).

Either way, they got outplayed.

interesting but weird article. It was hard to tell which statements were from insiders with Hoffman and which were commentary from the article's author.

That may very well have been the case but then they have a new problem: this smacks of carelessness.

Carelessness for who? Alman for not refilling the board when he had the chance? Others for the way they ousted him?

I wonder if there were challenges and disagreements about filling the board seats. Is it normal for seats to remain empty for almost a year for a company of this side? Maybe there was an inability to compromise that spiraled as the board shrank, until it was small enough to enable an action like this.

Just a hypothesis. Obviously this couldnt have happened if there was a 9 person board stacked with Altman allies. What I dont know is the inclinations of the departed members.

Carelessness from the perspective of those downstream of the board's decisions. Boards are supposed to be careful, not careless.

Good primer here:

https://www.onboardmeetings.com/blog/what-are-nonprofit-boar...

At least that will create some common reference.

Using that framework, I still think it is possible that this is the result of legitimate and irreconcilable differences in opinion about the organization’s mission and vision and execution.

Edit: it is also common for changing circumstance to bring pre-existing but tolerable differences to the relevant Forefront

Yes, and if that is so I'm sure there are meeting minutes that document this carefully, and that the fall-out from firing the CEO on the spot was duly considered and deemed acceptable. But without that kind of cover they have a real problem.

These things are all about balance: can we do it? do we have to do it? is there another solution? and if we have to do it do we have to do it now or is there a more orderly way in which it can be done? And so on. And that's the sort of deliberation that shows that you took your job as board member serious. Absent that you are open to liability.

And with Ilya defecting the chances of that liability materializing increases.

I see your point.

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