On the one hand, the board was an insane cult of effective altruism / longtermism / LessWrong, so fuck them. But on the other hand, this was a worker revolt for the capitalists, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising since tech workers famously lack class consciousness.
Several of the [former] board members are affiliated with the movement. EA is concerned with existential risk, AI being perceived as a big one. OpenAI's nonprofit was founded with the intent to perform research AI safely, and those members of the board still reflected that interest.
Actually that's just self interest. Both capitalism and socialism claim to benefit workers. But only socialism has remotely shown to do that to any extent. Capitalist hoarding and speculation is the primary driver of inflation and things like the inafordability of housing.
If you labor for a living, you aren't a capitalist. You're labor.
I’m sure the developers make the lower half of six figures, but they still have to sell their labor to survive, so they’re still working class.
I’ve been an SF Bay Area software developer for almost thirty years, so I know them well. I consider us members of the professional–managerial class (PMC). We generally think we’re “above” the working class (we’re not), and so we seldom have any sense of solidarity with the rest of the working class (or even each other), and we think unionization is for those other people and not us.
When Hillary Clinton talked about the “basket of deplorables,” she was talking to her PMC donors & voters about the rest of the working class, and we eat that shit up. Most of my peers have still learned no lessons from her election defeat, preferring to blame debunked RussiaGate conspiracy theories.