When you consider they were acting under the threat of the entire company walking out and the threat of endless lawsuits, this is a remarkably mild capitulation. All the new board members are going to be chosen by D'Angelo and two new board members that he also had a big hand in choosing.
And say what you want about Larry Summers, but he's not going to be either Sam's or even Microsoft's bitch.
What I'd want to say about Larry is that he is definitely not going to care about the whole-society non-profit shtick of the company to any degree comparable with the previous board members, so he won't constraint Sam/MS in any way
Why? As an economist, he perfectly understands what is a public good, why there is a market failure to underproduce a public good under free market, and role of nonprofit in public good production.
Larry Summers has a track record of not believing in market failures, just market opportunities for private interests. Economists vary vastly in their belief systems, and economics is more politics than science, no matter how much math they try to use to distract from this.
I wonder what is the rationale for picking a seasoned politician and economist (influenced deregulation of US finance system, was friends with Epstein, had a few controversies listed there). Has the government also entered the chat so obviously?
They had congressman Will Hurd on the board before. Govt-adjacent people on non-profits are common for many reasons - understanding regulatory requirements, access to people, but also actual "good" reasons like the fact that many people who work close to the state genuinely have good intentions on social good (whether you agree with their interpretation of it or not)
On what premise you assume that D'Angelo will have any say there? At this point he won't be able to do any moves - especially with Larry and Microsoft overseeing all that stuff.
Again, D'Angelo chose Larry Summers and Bret Taylor to sit on the board with him himself. As long as it is the three of them, he can't be overruled unless both of his personal picks disagree with him. And if the opposition to his idea is all that bad, he probably really should be overruled.
His voting power will get diluted as they add the next six members, but again, all three of them are going to decide who the next members are going to be.
A snippet from the recent Bloomberg article:
>A person close to the negotiations said that several women were suggested as possible interim directors, but parties couldn’t come to a consensus. Both Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire philanthropist and widow of Steve Jobs, and former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer were floated, *but deemed to be too close to Altman*, this person said.
Say what else you want about it, this is not going to be a board automatically stacked in Altman's favor.
And say what you want about Larry Summers, but he's not going to be either Sam's or even Microsoft's bitch.