On Friday afternoon, Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI. Five days later he’s back at the helm and most of the board that tried to oust him are out instead. It’s the end of a bizarre sequence of events that saw OpenAI go through two interim CEOs, Altman briefly hired by Microsoft and over 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees signing a letter threatening to join their former boss unless he returned. The prospect of Microsoft essentially acquiring OpenAI for free has now faded, but they may prefer to keep OpenAI separate rather than swallowing them whole anyway – having the company as an external partner has allowed OpenAI to “move fast and break things” while Microsoft goes at its own cautious pace. OpenAI employees had pledged to follow Altman to Microsoft, but in practice may not have relished working directly for the commercially focused technology giant. Many joined explicitly because of OpenAI’s mission to build advanced general intelligence and see the company as an AI Manhattan project. Microsoft will likely have representation on OpenAI’s new board and more leverage than before.