Ten days ago OpenAI was worth $86 billion. Investors in OpenAI were about to launch a tender offer to buy employee shares at that valuation, and employees were lining up to tender; there were willing buyers and sellers at that price. Then events occurred. There was a boardroom coup, and OpenAI’s founder and chief executive officer, Sam Altman, was fired. At one point, the valuation of OpenAI was apparently zero dollars: Several OpenAI investors were noisily saying that they were going to write down their shares to zero,1 and it looked like Microsoft Corp. was about to acquire most of OpenAI’s staff without paying the company (or its other investors) anything for them. But then there was another boardroom coup, Altman got his job back, and most of the directors who fired him were themselves fired. Altman returned, and there have been suggestions that he (and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor) extracted some promises that this sort of thing won’t be allowed to happen again, that there will be fundamental governance changes to make OpenAI more robust and, probably, more commercial. So how much should OpenAI be worth today? Some possible answers: 1.Less than $86 billion, for governance reasons: After a rapid rise in prominence and valuation, OpenAI revealed some serious cracks, causing its valuation to become zero dollars for a while, meaning that investors should be far more cautious about it now than they were before. It is more volatile than people thought. The lesson of the last week, I suggested on Tuesday, might be “don’t invest in nonprofits at an $86 billion valuation”; maybe investors will learn that lesson. 2. More than $86 billion, for governance reasons: Those cracks were there from the beginning, and investors presumably accounted for them in that $86 billion valuation. But now that Altman has won his power struggle and cemented his control, the future OpenAI will be less weird and nonprofit-y and afraid of its own shadow. It’s the same exciting business but with better, more investor-friendly governance, so it should be worth more to investors.

Full opinion : How OpenAI’s leadership chaos points to lingering governance issues and could affect its business prospects ahead of fundraising at an $86B valuation