Were these board members brought in under the pretense that they'd benefit by being able to build companies on top of this AI and it would remain more of an R&D center without commercializing directly? Perhaps they were watching DevDay with Sam commercializing in a way that directly competes with their other ventures, and perhaps having even used the data of their other ventures for OpenAI, and on top of it as a board they're losing control to the for-profit entity. One can see the threads of a motivation. That being said, in every scenario I think incompetence is the primary factor.

To your point, no normal, competent board would even think this is enough of an excuse to fire the CEO of a superstar company.

It's hard to believe somehow Ilya went along with it, apparently.