OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary to allow it to fundraise vastly more sums than it believed people would be willing to donate. Today, the nonprofit owns roughly 25 percent, or more than $200 billion, of the company. It also has the power to block major business decisions and fire the company's executives.

Most people talk about OpenAI like it's basically 'owned by Microsoft,' but the actual cap table is much more spread out.

To the extentthat people accommodate themselves to the faceless inflexibility ofplatforms, they will become less and less capable of seeing thevirtues of institutions, on any scale. One consequence of thataccommodation will be an increasing impatience withrepresentative democracy, and an accompanying desire to replacepolitical institutions with platform-based decision making:referendums and plebiscites, conducted at as high a level as possible(national, or in the case of the European Union, transnational).Among other things, these trends will bring, in turn, theexploitation of communities and natural resources by people whowill never see or know anything about what they are exploiting. !escope of local action will therefore be diminished, and will comeunder increasing threat of what we might call, borrowing a phrasefrom Einstein, spooky action at a distance.

Oh, and to be absolutely clear, every example that I know of a company trying to adopt the "pioneer - settler - town planner" structure without first getting their principles in a decent state has ... failed. Principles first. Org structure later. Culture, later still.