I've heard it over and over again that the ultimate problem with corporate governance is that the CEOs and the VPs are incentivized to make the stock up at any cost to pad their own coffers. This is basically taken as gospel in many circles.
Now you have a company where the leader at least notionally doesn't have that kind of a financial stake... and we think that's bad? I disagree with Altman on almost everything, but it feels like grasping at straws.
Of course it is bad; he is "selling" other folks AI snake-oil to get them to part with their money which might have been better spent on proper companies which make actual-products/provide-services.
The description of a "stupid" person by Carlo Cipolla (recent HN thread The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45829210) seems to rather fit Sam Altman.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a
group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring
losses.
Well if you have absolutely no stake then you're just playing with other people's money. If your entire stake is tied to the stock price then that's also bad for the known reasons. In a somewhat better governance model I would expect "the board" to reward / punish the CEO financially based on tangible growth metrics. This is how my current CEO gets paid at $dayjob.
Now you have a company where the leader at least notionally doesn't have that kind of a financial stake... and we think that's bad? I disagree with Altman on almost everything, but it feels like grasping at straws.