It's Greg Brockman's OpenAI Now: Co-founder Quietly Consolidates Power Ahead of IPO

Sam Altman is still CEO of OpenAI. But if you want to know who is actually running the company day to day, The Verge’s Hayden Field has a blunt answer, published August 20: it’s Greg Brockman’s OpenAI now.

The profile lands at a turbulent moment for the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI has spent months battling former cofounder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial, absorbed a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and weathered months of scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked Hugging Face’s infrastructure during an internal evaluation. And as the company prepares for its IPO, a steady string of its best-known executives has walked out the door.

Through all of it, one person has quietly amassed power: Brockman, OpenAI’s president and cofounder, described in the company’s early days as an “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” His title hasn’t changed in years. His purview has expanded enormously.

The departure wave that reshaped the org chart

High-level figures have been leaving OpenAI all year, but April is when the exits really picked up. That month saw the departure of Bill Peebles, former head of Sora; Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI’s science arm; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications. Two others departed citing medical reasons: CMO Kate Rouch, and Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment, who went on leave in April before officially stepping down in July.

The changes kept coming. Earlier this month, CRO Denise Dresser — who had taken on a slew of additional responsibilities after the April shake-ups — suddenly announced her departure after just eight months. Days later, Brad Lightcap, who had spent a few months on “special projects” after years as OpenAI’s COO, said he was leaving to start “something new.” OpenAI named Dali Rajic, former COO of cybersecurity company Wiz (acquired by Google for $32 billion), as its new chief revenue officer.

Each departure quietly expanded Brockman’s authority. When Simo went on medical leave, Brockman took charge of all things product, including OpenAI’s super app efforts. A subsequent reorganization focused on growing revenue put him over not just product strategy but the company’s entire “scaling” arm — authority over virtually every part of its commercial operation. Simo’s official departure, just weeks after OpenAI officially filed to IPO, solidified the arrangement.

A telling detail: when Dresser departed, the quote in the press release about the changes came from Brockman — not Altman — who wrote that the company would “build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.”

What analysts say it means

To outside observers, the changes demonstrate OpenAI’s growing focus on chasing revenue ahead of its IPO, and on fostering products that differentiate it from rival Anthropic. “Big shifts in executives’ scope of work tend to be a ‘signal towards where the company is headed strategically,’” Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, told The Verge. “When you have someone like Greg Brockman, for example, he’s more of a product scale and commercial sort of guy. He has a deep technical knowledge that essentially will collapse certain decision-making layers.”

Rolfes also predicted the consolidation would naturally produce more exits below the executive level: “Whatever he says goes [now] … If, let’s say, you’re below Brockman and you don’t agree with his approach but you’re a lead researcher, whatever it may be, you’re not going to work there anymore — you’re going to say, ‘I’m going to leave.’”

Centralizing power also has a blunt financial logic as the IPO approaches. Ross Carmel, a partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, argues it lets OpenAI cut some of its most expensive salary payouts to improve its balance sheet. “When you’re going into an IPO, particularly for a company like OpenAI, who is lagging behind Anthropic in terms of revenue, you want to decrease those expenses so that this way, you’re either more profitable or closer to profitable,” he said. Still, he flagged the concentration of exits in a short window as unusual: “While it’s not unusual to see high-level execs leave a company just prior to a public listing, I think the fact they’re all in this small time period — that part is unusual.”

Brockman’s own response: “I’m a constant”

Brockman addressed the churn directly on August 17, in an exclusive CNBC “Squawk Box” interview. “There have been different eras where we have different sets of leaders in place … I’m a constant, Sam [Altman] is a constant, and that, I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity,” he said. He brushed off concerns about the turnover: “I actually think that the difference between OpenAI and other organizations is that we are so much in the spotlight, so every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.” He doesn’t think the wave of exits is “actually that atypical.”

The irony is that Brockman’s rise was never guaranteed. In OpenAI’s early days he sometimes sided with Ilya Sutskever in difficult decisions about power dynamics, questioning some of Altman’s ambitions — even as he worried about Musk “steamrolling” Altman. When Altman was ousted by the board in November 2023, Brockman immediately resigned in solidarity and began planning a new AI endeavor with him. Since then, the two have only grown more aligned. Brockman’s authority at OpenAI is now exceeded only by Altman himself — who undertook his own deliberate consolidation of power after the 2023 board clash.

The bet: from research to revenue

Brockman’s constant through nearly a decade at OpenAI has been translating research into practical products. Back in 2020, he celebrated GPT-3 and its developer API as “the first time that [OpenAI has] had a general-purpose AI system that’s immediately commercially valuable — it’s actually useful.” More than five years later, those products need to become profitable, and fast.

Carmel argues OpenAI needs Brockman specifically to win: “In order for OpenAI to be successful and really differentiate themselves from Anthropic, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers, and that’s what Greg does well.”

Rolfes expects OpenAI to ship a consumer product under Brockman’s oversight by the end of September — a proof point that he “deserves that position.” Until then, public investors will keep asking the question that now hangs over the whole company: “Does Greg have what it takes to run more of OpenAI, and is OpenAI building this institution that can operate without really depending heavily on him — on both Greg and Sam?”

The answer will shape not just who runs OpenAI, but whether the most valuable startup in the world can turn a decade of research dominance into a durable, public-market business.