OpenAI CEO Michael Brockman left to oust Steve Altman when he left for the Microsoft Silicon Valley Technicolor Hall of Fame

His sudden exit was more shocking than his return. In the course of three days, the Openai board moved through two CEOs to avoid any chance of resurrecting him. Employees of OpenAI threatened to switch to Microsoft if the board didn’t resign.

The company was in chaos over the last several days because of a coup attempt, but will soon have a CEO again. Brockman, who quit in protest, will return as well.

The board member who was in charge of the move to oust Altman was Helen Toner and she used her social media accounts to show her displeasure with the situation.

“OpenAI has the potential to be one of the most consequential companies in the history of computing,” Thrive partner Kelly Sims said in a statement shared with The Verge. “Sam and Greg possess a profound commitment to the company’s integrity, and an unmatched ability to inspire and lead. We couldn’t be more excited for them to come back to the company they founded and helped build into what it is today.”

The deal to return appears to be done without any last minute paperwork according to the posts by the key parties. Altman said that “everything I’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together.”

Sutskever, the CEO, and the Board of Action: Why Brockman’s firing triggered the resignation of OpenAI Chairman and CEO Sam Altman

Sutskever didn’t appreciate the joke that the org chart that mapped out this relationship looked like a future GPT might come up with. “We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure,” he admonished me. If you believe like we do, that if we succeed really well, then theGPUs will take my job and your job, and everyone’s job, and it seems nice if that company does not make unlimited amounts of returns. In the meantime, to make sure that the profit-seeking part of the company doesn’t shirk its commitment to making sure that the AI doesn’t get out of control, there’s that board, keeping an eye on things.

This would-be guardian of humanity is the same board that fired Sam Altman last Friday, saying that it no longer had confidence in the CEO because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” No examples of that alleged behavior were provided, and almost no one at the company knew about the firing until just before it was publicly announced. The Microsoft CEO and other investors did not receive advance notice. OpenAI president and chairman, Greg Brockman was kicked off the board by four of the six directors. Brockman quickly resigned.

Altman’s firing triggered an extraordinary few days in which he discussed returning to the company before agreeing to join Microsoft instead. On Monday morning, hundreds of staff signed a letter threatening to quit the company in protest over the board’s handling of Altman’s removal. By afternoon, more than 95 percent of the company had added their name to the letter.

After removing Altman last Friday, the board originally appointed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. It also removed Altman’s cofounder and the company’s president, Greg Brockman, from his position as chairman. Brockman quit several hours later.

It might have been hard to dream up a complicated story of corporate intrigue. Questions continue to swirl around what had prompted his dismissal in the first place.