The Quiet Silicon Valley Insider Complicating Sam Altman’s Return

Days after OpenAI’s board fired Altman, one of its members—chief scientist Ilya Sutskever—reversed course, tweeting that he regretted his actions. So far, though, there’s no sign other board members have changed their mind. D’Angelo, for his part, was recruiting tech leaders—including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—to serve as OpenAI’s new head over the weekend, frustrating Altman’s attempts at a return, people familiar with the matter said.

D’Angelo, a high school friend of Mark Zuckerberg who parlayed an early engineering job building ad systems at Facebook into tremendous wealth, appears to be the fulcrum of finding a resolution. In recent days, D’Angelo has been “occupying the most oxygen” among board members in talks between Altman and the board, a person close to the talks said.

D’Angelo, who has been a board member at OpenAI for five years, is now the tech insider with perhaps the most to lose or gain reputationally in the stalemate over Sam Altman’s firing from the startup. Out of the three remaining board members at the company, he is the only person who many in the tech world, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, know well. He sits firmly in an inner circle of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who invest in each other’s companies, recommend software engineering talent to each other and pontificate about the future of technology.

But events of the past few days have subjected him to online sniping from industry peers, and even Elon Musk has called on him to explain why the board ousted Altman. He faces immense pressure to reverse course. More than 710 OpenAI employees signed a letter saying they’ll jump ship to Microsoft if Altman isn’t reinstated. Investors in OpenAI, who stand to lose piles of money should employees walk out, are preparing legal action against board members, a person familiar with the matter said.

D’Angelo has seen some parallels on a smaller scale at Quora, which he founded and has run for 14 years. He sometimes fired executives abruptly without considering the impact on employees, three former employees said. One firing a few years ago rankled staff so much that a few dozen refused to show up to work the day after the dismissal, they said. D’Angelo sometimes frustrated employees by not explaining why he had fired executives.

The board’s exact reasons for firing Altman and keeping him out of the company remain a mystery. The board has said Altman was “not consistently candid” with members. An OpenAI memo clarified that Altman wasn’t involved in what it described as “malfeasance.” Even Altman skeptics, who say the former Y Combinator executive is prone to exaggerations and tangled investments, are trying to figure out the exact grounds for his termination.

D’Angelo didn’t return requests for comment.

OpenAI employees had previously sparred over the speed of development for artificial intelligence technologies, The Information reported. OpenAI’s primary mission, which it outlined when it started the for-profit arm in 2019 so it could raise investment capital, was to ensure that AI benefits humanity. That goal was more important than generating returns for investors, OpenAI said then.

D’Angelo, though, appeared to have conventional Silicon Valley optimism about the balance between tech growth and safety. One person who knows D’Angelo described him as pragmatic, and not overcautious about AI’s commercialization.

“Right now there’s a little bit of a climate of, like, if you say something that’s too positive, people need to cut you down and remind you of all the bad things that happened in the past,” D’Angelo told The Information in May. “But when you look at what’s been enabled by this technology so far, it’s very positive.”

D’Angelo was hardly trying to slow down AI’s advancement. He has been pointing his own entrepreneurial efforts over the past year to his own AI project, Poe, a platform he hatched out of Quora as a kind of web browser for AI bots. D’Angelo has been seeking to raise new money for the venture from tech investors in recent months, people familiar with the matter said. “Most of Quora’s energy is going toward Poe,” he said at a recent developer talk.

OpenAI launched a platform similar to Poe last month at its developer conference. The increasing overlap between D’Angelo’s Poe and OpenAI incited speculation online that Altman’s ouster was D’Angelo’s revenge.

The only public communication D’Angelo has made since Friday was a repost on Tuesday of a tweet by Amjad Masad, CEO of the startup Replit: “Have known Adam D’Angelo for many years and although I have not spoken to him in a while, the idea that he went crazy or is being vindictive over some feature overlap or any of the other rumors seems just wrong. It’s best to withhold [judgment] until more information comes out.”

D’Angelo is facing more criticism than the other two remaining independent board members who don’t appear to have changed their minds on Altman’s ouster. They are relative unknowns in the tech world: technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Over the past few days, other tech leaders have aimed criticism at D’Angelo’s past and at Quora. JD Ross, co-founder of online home seller Opendoor, attacked D’Angelo for his role as a seed investor in Opendoor, alleging in a post on X that D’Angelo told a potential recruit that he didn’t believe in Opendoor. Others have come to his defense, including former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, who called both Altman and D’Angelo “ridiculously rational people.”

In the past, Altman has been complimentary of D’Angelo, whom he brought onto the OpenAI board in 2018. In a 2017 blog post, he called D’Angelo “one of the few names that people consistently mention when discussing the smartest CEOs in Silicon Valley,” while complimenting his “long-term focus.” Altman told The Information earlier this year that he sometimes has late-night phone calls with D’Angelo to figure out problems. D’Angelo also sits on the board of Asana, the enterprise software firm run by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.

D’Angelo, meanwhile, has said he built Quora to help fulfill the “dream and promise of the internet to share knowledge.” But the site never really broke out as a major Silicon Valley success story, despite amassing hundreds of millions of monthly visitors. Recently, it’s been stuck between the popularity of two kinds of internet writing platforms—the subscription-based Substack and the more anarchic Reddit.

D’Angelo still uses the Quora site heavily, answering questions and promoting other users’ interesting answers. One user asked last month: “Why might two rational individuals arrive at different decisions given the same information?” A respondent ticked off reasons, including “different preferences,” “different constraints,” “different prior beliefs” and “one of us may have made a mistake.”

“Great answer,” D’Angelo wrote.