Profit or Purpose? OpenAI's $300 Billion Question, with Rose Chan Loui

All too often, capitalism is identified with the for-profit sector. However, one organizational form whose importance is often overlooked is nonprofits. Roughly 4% of the American economy, including most universities and hospital systems, are nonprofit.

One prominent nonprofit currently at the center of a raging debate is OpenAI, the $300 billion American artificial intelligence research organization best known for developing ChatGPT. Founded in 2015 as a donation-based nonprofit with a mission to build AI for humanity, it created a complex “hybrid capped profit” governance structure in 2019. Then, after a dramatic firing and re-hiring of CEO Sam Altman in 2023 (covered on an earlier episode of Capitalisn’t: “Who Controls AI?”), a new board of directors announced that achieving OpenAI’s mission would require far more capital than philanthropic donations could provide and initiated a process to transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation. This process has been fraught with corporate drama, including one early OpenAI investor, Elon Musk, filing a lawsuit to stop the process and launching a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.

Beyond the staggering valuation numbers at stake here–not to mention OpenAI’s open pursuit of profits over the public good–are complicated legal and philosophical questions. Namely, what happens when corporate leaders violate the founding purpose of a firm? To discuss, Luigi and Bethany are joined by Rose Chan Loui, the founding executive director of the Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law and co-author of the paper "Board Control of a Charity’s Subsidiaries: The Saga of OpenAI.” Is OpenAI a “textbook case of altruism vs. greed,” as the judge overseeing the case declared? Is AI for everyone, or only for investors? Together, they discuss how money can distort purpose and philanthropy, precedents for this case, where it might go next, and how it may shape the future of capitalism itself.

Show Notes:

Read extensive coverage of the Musk-OpenAI lawsuit on ProMarket, including Luigi’s article from March 2024: “Why Musk Is Right About OpenAI.”

Guest Disclosure (provided to The Conversation for an op-ed on the case): The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article. They have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.