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What’s the bet that OpenAI’s senior management team undergoes a shake-up before the company goes public? On Sunday, The Information reported that finance chief Sarah Friar has concerns about OpenAI’s readiness to go public and its ability to support its AI server commitments. And on Monday, The New Yorker published a long profile of CEO Sam Altman that reinforced longstanding questions about his trustworthiness.
It doesn’t seem likely that these two executives can credibly stand in front of investors together pitching an IPO. Friar seems vulnerable to replacement, given that Altman has frozen her out of some key meetings and demoted her to report to one of his underlings, as our story said. But The New Yorker profile, by reopening questions about Altman’s management style, might suggest the company would be better off if he left.
Let’s not forget that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has taken a few subtle shots at OpenAI’s approach to risk management. When it comes down to it, investors might decide they prefer someone they can rely on to be careful running OpenAI. After all, the company is spending a lot of money and taking on a lot of commitments. As Amodei keeps reminding us, it’s easy to screw things up in a way that leads to financial ruin.
Still, Altman is a survivor. And for those people paying close attention to OpenAI, The New Yorker piece had little new in it that hadn’t been previously reported elsewhere. As an OpenAI spokesperson told me, “much of the [New Yorker] piece revisits previously reported events through anonymous claims and selective anecdotes sourced from people with clear agendas.” Indeed, the piece could be said to be a win for Altman, effectively clearing him of some particularly seedy allegations that have circulated.
One of these days, though, OpenAI might want to make itself less of a soap opera.
Oracle’s Finance Switch
Normally the appointment of a new chief financial officer isn’t a big story, but Oracle’s announcement of one on Monday was a bit different. That’s because it hasn’t had an executive with that title for more than a decade, since then-CFO Safra Catz took the title of CEO in 2014. Despite changing titles, she appears to have kept the finance responsibilities as she remained “principal financial officer", the company’s securities filings show.
Last September, when Catz suddenly stepped down as CEO, Oracle named a longtime operations executive, Doug Kehring, to succeed her as principal financial officer. That put him in the hot seat. Oracle was spending heavily to expand its AI data center cloud business, including by borrowing tens of billions. It seems a strange time for it to appoint someone whose background is more in operations as its top financial executive. In his operations role, Kehring oversaw Oracle’s move to the cloud, for instance, his LinkedIn page says.
It turns out Oracle just needed time to find the right person. On Monday, the company announced that Hilary Maxson would become CFO, effective immediately. She had been in that role at Schneider Electric, which sells electrical equipment to data centers and other industries. That makes her an ideal person for the Oracle job. The only question is, why didn’t Oracle do the search six months earlier?
In Other News
• ServiceNow chairman and CEO Bill McDermott saw his compensation climb 37% to nearly $52 million in 2025, according to a regulatory filing Monday, thanks to a 30% higher cash bonus of $3.5 million and $43 million of stock awards.
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