Emergency Episode! Sam Altman Out at OpenAI and X's Advertiser Exodus

32m
It's an emergency crossover episode of Pivot and the Prof G Pod and there's a lot to discuss. Sam Altman is out as CEO of OpenAI – but what exactly happened? Kara shares her latest reporting. Plus, major advertisers are fleeing X after Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Will Elon and X survive the firestorm? Kara and Scott break it all down.
Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial.
Follow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast.
Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or at nymag.com/pivot.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen and follow along

Transcript

Support for the show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue.

Sacks Fifth Avenue makes it easy to shop for your personal style.

Follow us here, and you can invest in some new arrivals that you'll want to wear again and again, like a relaxed product blazer and Gucci loafers, which can take you from work to the weekend.

Shopping from Saks feels totally customized, from the in-store stylist to a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you things that fit your style and taste.

They'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in, or when that Brunello Cacchinelli sweater you've been eyeing is back in stock.

So, if you're like me and you need shopping to be personalized and easy, head to Saks Fifth Avenue for the best follow rivals and style inspiration.

So your AI agents, they make the team that uses them more productive, right?

But if they aren't connected to other agents or your data or your existing workflows, how productive can they really make your teams?

Any business can add AI agents.

IBM connects your agents across your company to change how you do business.

Let's create Smarter Business, IBM.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

And this is an emergency crossover episode of Pivot and the Prof G-Pod because a lot of news just broke in the last few hours, especially because it's a Friday and we need to discuss it.

Let's start with a story I don't think anyone saw coming.

Sam Altman is out as CEO of OpenAI.

Quote, this is from the board, quote, Mr.

Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.

The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI.

Chief Technology Officer Mira, I think it's Marati, is now the interim CEO.

Altman himself posted on X, I love my time at OpenAI.

It was transformative for me personally and hopefully the world a little bit.

Most of all, I love working with such talented people.

We'll have more to say about what's next later.

So, just so you know, the president and co-founder of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, posted a statement a little while ago that he is quitting following the news.

As I noted in a post myself, I've done a little reporting.

There are a lot more departures of top folks.

I've been hearing from them all night at OpenAI.

I understand it was a misalignment of the profit versus nonprofit adherents of the company.

Developer Day was an inflection point.

Some people on Sam's side are calling it a a coup.

Other people are calling it a misalignment, as I said, or that it was getting too far away from

its open nonprofit status and was moving too quickly, not thinking of safety and diversity and other issues.

and that he was doing stuff without consulting them.

And there was a side of the company, including its chief scientist and another board member who were on one side, and Brockman and were another.

The way

the

board phrased it was so funny, the candid, meaning he lied.

That's a word for lie.

It did leave open enormous amounts of rumors, including some very sordid personal ones on the internet.

I've been trying to chase all those down too, because people were like, oh, it was really this and it was this.

And I'm not even going to repeat them because I haven't been able to confirm any of them.

You know, I just don't want to go anywhere with stuff I don't know.

It sounds like this developer day was an issue and that maybe, you know, he was the face of AI and open AI.

He's gotten very famous.

He was just at a meeting in San Francisco with the president.

He's been all over the place.

As you know, I've interviewed him a bunch of times.

I happen to like Sam Altman.

But I think there was a real misalignment here.

Let me say one last thing is Microsoft absolutely didn't know this was coming.

And my sources say Satchi didn't know.

And the company was told just minutes before they put out the press release.

So they were caught unawares.

So, you know, I don't know.

I don't know.

It's really a big deal, I think.

This is a big, big deal.

It is a big deal.

And there's a lot here, and we'll know more.

So

I think you can make an educated, there's an educated guess around what happened, but an uneducated guess around what inspired.

And what likely happened

is that the board found something that upset them, asked him to clarify, and then later they found that he had lied and misled them.

Because for them to dismiss a CEO who has created or at least spearheaded an increase in

$90 billion and quite frankly was seen as sort of a good guy, a lot of hope.

This is the most exciting new technology in probably a decade.

This must have been real.

I mean,

boards don't do this lightly.

And I would put it, you know, if you wanted to now start handicapping the why and the uneducated guess.

the personal scandal stuff, I think it's less likely because other executives are resigning.

And if it had been a personal scandal thing, I think they would have thought, well, maybe I'll be the CEO or I don't want to get anywhere near the appearance of support of this type of behavior.

It would just be, and not only that, I hate to say this incorrectly, probably, or correctly.

When you create $90 billion in shareholder value, boards have a habit of trying to wallpaper over scandal

or personal scandal.

And then when there was...

Because look, I just said people, you know, there was, I've gotten everything from he was doing some of the company, like maybe it was this, maybe it was that, right?

You know what I mean?

You can go through all of the possibilities.

That seems less likely.

What seems the most likely here

is that Sam

was

investing in.

doing a side hustle, starting something that had some sort of competitive conflict, perhaps with other people at the company.

I'll just give you a scenario.

Maybe at some point OpenAI has decided we want to pull an Apple and not be dependent upon NVIDIA or Intel.

The way Apple was dependent on Intel, they said we're going to develop our own chips.

Maybe Open AI said, we have enough money now, we should develop our own chips instead of building NVIDIA's business.

And they were developing their own chips.

And at the same time, Sam was working with other people and funding a chip company focused on AI and maybe wasn't as forthcoming about his activities as the board would have liked.

And they feel like, boss, you can't have your cake and eat it too, and dismissed him.

The notion around the semantics around the split between profit and nonprofit, I find that unlikely because there's so much money here.

Yeah, just so you know, OpenAI was exploring making its own chips.

But I'm using that as an example.

Starting another generative AI company.

Who knows, right?

Yeah, he's got a lot of other interests, including fusion, energy, all kinds of things.

But

the board doing this, I mean, I was sad in the sense that I was hoping this guy was going to be the anti-Elon and present a more optimistic, aspirational, and quite frankly, just responsible, masculine, mature version of what it means to be a business leader.

So I was disappointed that he was ousted.

It's a victory for corporate governance, though, because

boards, the whole point of it.

Well, if that's what he did, if they just had a misalignment about profit versus nonprofit, then it's a little funnier, right?

Don't you find it?

I personally think that the whole point of corporate governance and governance in general, whether it's the Congress or whether it's board of directors, is that we have figured out that when individuals aggregate a lot of power, it begins to corrupt their thinking and that they can become dangerous and make bad decisions that are bad for stakeholders.

So we create governance.

And governance is meant to prevent a tragedy to the commons, protect shareholders, and act as fiduciaries and do something wonderful.

And that has tapped into our advantage as a species and cooperate with each other and learn from one another.

And when you have no board, no governance, no fiduciary responsibility,

it goes bad places.

So I think this is actually, in my opinion.

What if he's not wrong about the direction?

The developer day was very exciting and everything else.

Maybe they're just a bad board.

Maybe they're an inexperienced board.

Maybe they made the wrong decision.

press release feels stupid to me unless he's the way they phrased it left them open to all kinds of problems.

And we have bad referees in the Premier League and on the whole, it's the way to govern the game.

Of course, but what if it's just a bad board and they just had a fight and one side beat the other?

You know, that doesn't make them a good, good government.

I would bet.

I'd have to push back on this from my reporting.

I would bet when the news comes out,

I just find it highly unlikely that a group of people governing a company that had increased 90 billion in value,

I can't imagine they wanted to do do this, Kara.

I think we're going to find it was really.

If they didn't like the direction of the company, if they thought he was too organized around profit,

if they didn't like how the developer day, which again, several people on both sides said it was an inflection point

of tension.

So,

you know, it's just a direction thing.

So, no, I think they could do that.

That's happened on boards.

We're going to go this way and not this way.

Well, boards.

And one side tends to win.

Boards make bad decisions all the time.

When you're ousting the CEO of a company that, as I said, has created this amount of economic value, and there's enough to go around for everyone.

For the nonprofit side, the profit side, they're all making a shit ton of money.

And they decided to fire him.

Well, not Sam Altman.

He doesn't own very much of it.

Well, okay, better yet.

But I got to think there's a there there here.

This is pretty dramatic.

Yeah, it is.

Maybe it's just that.

It's just

a difference of the way, the direction of the company.

And he was going going a different direction and just not heeding them, right?

And that's a problem, of course, because a board is a board is a board, right?

Maybe he was taking a direction and just wasn't dialing them in, you know, to it.

I would not blame a young man in this environment who creates tens of billions of dollars of thinking, I can do whatever the fuck I want.

Yes, that's crazy.

Because

the role model here does whatever the fuck he wants and totally ignores his board.

He has no board.

And so

I wouldn't find it unusual to find out that the CEO was ignoring everything the board told him he could or could not do.

You know, we'll just find out.

But this is

phonics by this.

The board needed to be much more transparent, and he's got to make a statement, too.

Now it's kind of like

only because there's so much, you know, in several articles previously, he's got a sister who's making all those kinds of allegations against him, which has been out for a while.

I'm not even going to go through them right now.

People, I did run that down too.

People thought me had nothing to do with it.

They've got to be more clear.

This is the Zeitgeist company of the moment.

And if they're not clear and transparent and their statement, I'm sorry, I thought was clottish.

Like, what?

What does that mean?

What did he lie about?

You can't just be unspecific.

If you were, if there was a real problem, they should have been.

We've hired an outside law firm to do an investigation.

Like, they were so unspecific that it left everything open.

And you cannot do that.

They don't understand.

It gives me the impression that this company doesn't, the board of the company or the one that won doesn't understand the impact this company is having, right?

Like, or something.

It seems like a very inexperienced board.

And I think it is.

Well,

within a couple of hours, it's probably already happening.

Both sides are going to go on background and try and spin it to their advantage.

Yes.

Yep.

And so we're going to find out.

We're going to find out what happened here.

But this is,

I mean, I was totally shocked.

I do, I got to be honest, though, I do like the fact that this will send a signal to CEOs that everyone has a boss and boards manager.

I think it's going to send a signal to if it's just a matter of these disagreements over the direction of the company, that Sam Altman is going to be funded tomorrow.

And all these people have left.

All these people are leaving.

Open AI will go with him and they will just reformat, you know.

Let me just say, we've done this before.

We leave and go to things, right?

And it's never as juicy as it is inside.

It's usually just a misalignment.

It is indeed a significant thing.

But you just said, you just offered a very realistic scenario here.

And that is, he's not getting funded tomorrow.

He was funded several months ago to do something competitive and didn't disclose it.

And I have no evidence of that.

I just can't imagine this board

would say, okay,

this thing is a rocket ship.

It's going to create enough value to solve a lot of problems.

Non-profit, for-profit.

But this guy is, you just don't fire

a CEO on a company that's creating this type of value.

No, you know, and if it's a personal thing, they should have said we're doing an investigation right away.

Like, it should have said that.

I know, I don't think that's the case, but because would the president leave with him the same day?

Yeah, I know that.

It feels like when they don't work in the middle.

I don't think that, but I think that they should have been more clear.

This statement is claudish to the extreme.

I just was like, you're leaving, what happened here?

You can't be this unspecific and yet say a word like not candid.

What does that mean?

Right.

They were specific and deeply unspecific, leaving them open to all kinds of crazy rumors, all kinds of speculation, and it is, and pretending it's not the most important company, AI, right?

So, and then, and then, and then surprising Microsoft, their big partner and their big funder.

Are you kidding me?

Microsoft should have known

days in advance, like what was happening.

They had to look stupid.

He was on stage with them last week.

No, Satcha didn't know.

Let me just.

That's my point.

Satcha didn't know.

So that means something's wrong with his board.

That's my feeling.

Or something is

governance.

Like, you don't tell Satcha Nadella.

You do not surprise Satcha Nadella.

That's my feeling.

As somebody who's giving you billions and billions of dollars in investment, they're going to pull it.

You know, they've got their product, but I don't know.

When you're building this kind of value and all the things you just talked about, we got Microsoft as a partner.

He was on stage with the CEO.

I think there's a lot of reasons to not fire him, and they decided to fire him

in a pretty unceremonial fashion.

Maybe, maybe there was an article being worked on, and they, I don't know.

I would like them to be specific.

If it's a really serious personal thing, you need to say we're doing an investigation.

If it's not, you need to be more clear.

It's really left it far too open.

It's really badly done.

Badly done, let's just say.

Poorly done.

I'm also getting a bunch of theories from very smart people in Silicon Valley via Text Live as we talk.

One theory from one person who actually does know quite a bit about this board is that he called them effective altruists.

Like they're very like

much more oriented towards non-profit ideas of what

chat GPT should be versus a commercial operation.

So interesting.

A lot of the board, in fact, when you look at it, is of that,

in that direction.

I don't know if it's effective altruism, but it's definitely much more, it's a crunchier group of people, I would say.

Yeah, that would so that sounds like one viable kind of door number three here, but I just would have been shocked they couldn't figure it out, given the amount of money that's being created, that they couldn't have figured out a way to say, okay, well,

10 billion to build, you know, parks and

homes for veterans.

I would have just thought they would have tried to figure this out.

Yeah, well, I had a very smart person also just text me my boring version board don't launch gpt store until it's safe sam okay also sam we launched gpt store

so yeah and it goes back to the notion that i it just you you wouldn't be surprised nor could you really i don't want to say blame sam altman but when he looks around and says oh people of my genius and my shareholder value creation can do whatever the fuck i want the board is just there to rubber stamp it full stop well we'll enjoy his new company Closed AI.

There you go.

Anyway, it's not just open AI making news.

Elon Musk and X are dealing with a firestorm.

Yet again, this follows Elon's comments on X endorsing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory by saying it's the actual truth.

Usually he goes, interesting, or something like this.

But now he said this is the actual truth, which was a trope around

Jewish people having a dialectical something or other hatred, a dialectical hatred of white people and trying to replace them by bringing immigrants into this company.

It's one of the most more heinous

anti-Semitic tropes, replacement theory.

So he did that

and major advertisement, and then Linda Yaccarino, the pain sponge, was trying to dial it back by saying, we don't agree with this at all, but never mentioned her, the CTO, because the call is coming from inside the house.

Major advertisers on X are now cutting off their spending.

Companies are pulling back, including Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery, Lionsgate, Apple, and IBM.

I've heard from a half dozen more who are pulling, just calling me, saying we're going to pull too.

Even Comcast, NBC Universal, paused advertising.

That's Linda Yakarina's former employer, where she was head of advertising.

It's been a deluge in the last few hours.

The White House has also chimed in and condemned Muss for boosting anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

The White House spokesman said it was, quote, unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of anti-Semitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

He's trying to dial it back by saying he's going to kick off everyone who says things like from the river to the sea,

decolonization.

And he's saying genocide is not acceptable.

Thank you, Elon.

Who's on the genocides, except for the genociders?

It was so ridiculous.

What a ridiculous.

It's easier to speculate what happened here, And that is

go right ahead.

Well,

the guy gets home late, is ridiculously high,

and the real Elon comes out, the angry, whatever,

you know.

I got a lot of pushback for calling him an anti-Semite.

I think he's absolutely an anti-Semite.

And then he says this, and advertisers start.

falling, you know, withdrawing like crazy, including pretty iconic ones, Apple, IBM.

And Linda calls him and says, you're going to have to put more money into the company.

And all of a sudden he's like, uh-oh.

And then he starts saying, he starts backpedaling.

And it's so ridiculous for him to say, we will not tolerate this kind of hate speech unless you're high on ketamine and own the company.

And at four in the morning, start tweeting out anti-Semitic tweets.

I mean, it was just so ridiculous for him then to pretend that he's a warrior against these.

against these hateful these hateful terms.

And also, I've got to be honest, I'm heartened by this because I have been really disappointed that more people have not been more

robust, strong,

pushing back on anti-Semitic comments.

Well,

no well-known people have, no other billionaires.

Can I just make this point?

I gave him a hard time.

Bill Ackman, who's like beating up on college students who, let's just say, probably don't have good judgment, has

not word one about this.

About

Twitter and Elon?

About Elon.

Not word one.

Here he is like doxing kids.

I'm sorry.

These kids are stupid and there's not that many of them that are that stupid.

Some of them just are calling for a ceasefire and they can do that in America.

Like we may agree or not agree with them, but this guy was trying to dox them and then he has not a word for this, which is such an obvious thing.

Nobody does.

None of the.

The finance community has a lot of leadership that's Jewish whose parents are Holocaust survivors.

They are.

And they don't come out against Twitter because they, or they want to be involved in SpaceX's IPO.

Right, exactly.

Hey, Bill Ackman.

Come on, Bill.

And here's the reality.

90 years ago, we didn't speak up enough.

And it's happening again.

So organizations, people,

customers, financiers, and just general U.S.

citizens need to speak up and say, I'm selling my fucking Tesla.

I am not going on.

Some of them are.

Some of Tesla's backers are doing that right now.

But let me say, tell me why they can go after students like this.

And you could have disagree with these students and say they're acting badly and whatever, and then say nothing.

Please explain that to me, how you can punch down but not up.

You're 100% correct.

And not only that, quite a bit.

I want you to explain it to me since you worked with these terrible people.

Since I worked.

No,

it's indefensible.

Not only that, these people should be held to a higher standard than students because they should know better.

They are responsible for the livelihoods of other companies.

They have enormous influence.

When you're a 19-year-old

where your prefrontal cortex is still evolving and you're pushing the limits

as a function of growth and evolution, you're pushing the limits and the boundaries, which is natural.

That's part of growth.

And you say something stupid.

We provide young people with a bit of a hall pass.

And I have said,

there's a difference between free speech and hate speech.

And if a student is saying hateful things, I think he or she should be

incenting violence, should be brought in front of a student board and even maybe just suspended and have to call their parents and say, this is why you're paying for me to be at school and I was suspended.

I think that's a learning moment.

But when you're the wealthiest man in the world and you're responsible for employees and you have dramatic influence over the behavior, you set a role model for young men, and you start talking about retweeting things about replacement theory, that's totally fucking unacceptable.

And what I find just so upsetting is not as many people as I would have thought nor hoped have said,

I'm embarrassed.

I wrote a biography on this guy.

We are canceling the movie we were going to do on him.

I am selling my Tesla.

I am selling my shares.

We will not be involved in any financing, wealth management, or debt offerings for any company that this individual is involved in.

If we don't cauterize this shit right now,

it gets out of control.

And I'm just incredibly shocked and disappointed that more people aren't

pushing back.

They're going to make the movie.

I have written lots of these people, just so you know, I've written a lot of them.

And they're just like, well, I'm like, well, what?

Well, he doesn't mean it.

I'm like, oh my God, it's the seventh, tenth time he's

either retweeted an anti-Semitic thing.

And in this case, he's now gone even further.

He agrees with it and he says he agrees with it.

I was like, how many times is he going to get a pass here on this stuff from you people?

Because you're here.

I literally, I'm like, I'm washing my hands at you people because I just don't even understand.

I do understand it now.

The money, the green is what you're looking at here.

And, you know, and listen, Linda Yaccarino, I don't know what you're going to do here, but don't stop.

going down with this ship.

You better find yourself a door you can float on at some point here because this is really appalling.

This is appalling.

It's appalling you didn't call out your own employee, by the way, the CTO of your company.

I don't know.

What's going to happen to her?

She got to go?

I've been told by people close to her that she's going to go down with a ship.

That's for

she's in literally an impossible position.

She can leave.

I think she would do herself well.

I'm biased here to say,

she doesn't even have to be this specific.

I'm just not, if she said, look, this is a great opportunity.

I don't mean to throw the company into more chaos, but I'm just personally not comfortable with some of the actions and words of the person who controls this company.

I think she'd get a job offer the next day.

Next day.

We'd give her a job.

Yeah, and not only that,

you know what?

She already has enough money.

Her kids would be proud of her when they're talking about mom.

You know,

you got to think about, you know, how history is going to judge you.

It's never the wrong time to do the right thing, especially when you're in a position of economic security.

I'd say that again.

It's never.

It's never.

It's not the economic security.

It's never the

wrong time to do the right thing.

Nice.

It's true.

Yeah.

So where does it go?

Do you think he gets another pass, like a Trumpian thing?

Oh, did he say that?

It'll be, advertisers will fall.

Now his advertising revenue will be down 80%.

And he will fund the thing because he's still the wealthiest man in the world.

And all of these companies

that will send out tweets about or Instagram posts about Indigenous Peoples Day will line up, even though they have,

you know,

I won't even say a lot of Jews in their company, but claim to be concerned about bigotry

and suck as cock so they can get the next IPO.

And

this type of behavior, principles don't mean anything unless you're willing to sacrifice for them.

That's right.

So what I would say to the investment banks involved and constantly doing debt offerings, financings for this company, are your notions that anti-Semitic content is

and statements are unacceptable?

Is that a principle of yours or is it just an opinion?

If it's a principle, then you can't work with this guy.

Yeah.

They don't, honestly, I just, I was only using Ackman as one of the examples, but boy, like, we're waiting, Bill.

We're waiting for some statement because this was pretty appalling.

And it was, it wasn't pretty appalling.

It was appalling, period.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

I don't know.

What's it worth now?

Is it half as much?

Again, it goes back to governance.

He has no boards.

Yeah.

Any board, and this goes back to income inequality.

When someone can aggregate a quarter of a trillion dollars in wealth and start buying huge influential companies and have absolutely no safeguards, the board of this company, even if it was a real board, if Tesla was a real board, they would say, you can't be on Twitter.

I'm going to, let me, let me...

pretend I'm the hero here.

I've been on boards where there's been a control shareholder, and we on the board have said we recommend the following, firing the CEO or not firing, whatever it might be, or doing this or not doing this.

And the control shareholder calls us and says, no, and I'm in control here.

I'm the control shareholder.

And then the board says, and this has happened to me twice, fine, then we will resign and you can replace us.

And the world will know that in a public company, the control shareholder got in a fight with the board and the independent board directors resigned.

That's what this, in my opinion, if this board, these boards had any principles, they would say, Elon, either you stop tweeting or I'm resigning from this board.

But they all want the money.

They all want to be near the innovator.

They all want to be next to this cool company.

These companies have no boards.

They clearly don't even want to save this guy from himself.

But there are things the investment banks, his board of directors, should, can, and should be doing.

And instead, everyone's like, well, everyone starts making all these excuses.

And you're right.

And then with these students, they want it to be one strike and you're out.

I'll tell you what I hear from him.

Oh, Kerry's not really anti-Semitic.

I'm like, really?

Because it feels very anti-Semitic, the things he's retweeting and posting and promoting.

And

this is the actual truth.

Pretty clear.

Pretty clear when you're talking about replacement theory

or the dialectical hatred of white people.

I'm like, well, it feels, oh, well, he does.

Oh, well, they're always, this is what happens.

And I literally, I'm now hanging up the phone.

And this goes to the notion of

this

reservoir that I just didn't,

the surface area of the iceberg below the surface of anti-Semitism that I had no idea existed.

Let me ask you this.

What if he was saying this about non-whites?

How would Hollywood respond?

What if he was making this

if there was the same level?

He said it about gays.

He's already been insulting to gays.

So keep going.

He has

He has made homophobic

and transphobic.

But in general, what I have found is the level of

tolerance for this anti-Semitic hate speech recently.

If I said any of this shit about non-whites or gay people on campus, if

this is

the double standard here, enough is enough.

If people need to speak out.

Why don't you say that to Bill Ackman?

Enough is enough, Bill.

Well,

I think we're saying that, but let's be honest.

Bill, you got to give Bill some credit.

I'm not going to give him credit because he's not, I don't want him punching down at students when he refuses to punch up at Elon Musk.

Okay, but he's mostly going after the leadership of these universities.

I don't care.

He should say something about Elon Musk.

This is the most famous person on the planet Earth right now.

I agree.

So come on.

Don't get on your high horse and then refuse to look straight at the person who has more influence than all those college campus heads put together.

So anyway, all right, we're going to end it there.

I'm going to read some very funny one thing that Twitter and also threads are good at is making jokes about this.

So there's a couple I want to read about Sam Altman leading.

Maybe GPT-5 is already sentient and live and wants Sam Altman gone.

This is from New York Times Pitchbot.

Probably was a mistake for Sam Altman to do that TikTok about how much he loves Osama bin Laden.

Another one, Sam Altman was actually typing out all the chat GPT responses himself, and the board just found out.

I thought that was funny.

The one I saw that I liked was, if Mike Pence had only done the right thing.

That's good.

This is an unfolding story, as you would say, or developing story.

Developing story.

So we'll see what happens.

We'll see.

Maybe something even more.

heinous will come out about Sam.

Something, we are certain that Elon Musk will say something even more heinous, and he still won't get into trouble.

That we can assure you of.

Okay, Scott, we're going to wrap it up there.

We'll have much more on Pivot and the Profit You pod next week.

I'm going to read us out because this is an emergency pod.

Can you just go, emergency?

Just want to hear you say that.

I want to hear you say it loud.

Emergency.

No, that's not an emergency podcast.

I'm going to hear in some weird sex game.

You're making me uncomfortable.

What's my safe word here?

You're making me feel uncomfortable.

Well, you know what my safe word is?

The board is firing you now.

Do you know what my safe word is?

I'll tell you what.

Maybe.

Okay.

Scott,

you've been less than candid with us about, and we're going going to have to fire you now, just so you know.

Yeah, yeah.

This show was produced by Nishat Kirwa and Zoe Marcus.

Brandon McFarlane engineered this episode.

Thanks also to Claire Miller and Drew Burroughs.

Thanks for listening to Pivot and the Prof.

G Pod from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Obviously, we'll be back soon.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

Support for the show comes from Mercury.

What if banking did more?

Because to you, it's more than an invoice.

It's your hard work becoming revenue.

It's more than a wire.

It's payroll for your team.

It's more than a deposit.

It's landing your fundraise.

The truth is, banking can do more.

Mercury brings all the ways you use money into a single product that feels extraordinary to use.

Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business.

Mercury, banking that does more.