[jbernsteiniv]

He gets my respect for that one both publicly acknowledging why he was leaving and their pantomime. I don't know how much the equity would be for each employee (the article suggests millions but that may skew by role) and I don't know if I would just be like the rest by keeping my lips tight for fear of the equity forfeiture.

It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.

[romwell]

>It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.

Incidentally, that's what Grigory Perelman, the mathematician that rejected the Fields Medal and the $1M prize that came with it, did.

It wasn't a matter of an NDA either; it was a move to make his message heard (TL;DR: "publish or perish" rat race that the academia has become is antithetical to good science).

He was (and still is) widely misunderstood in that move, but I hope people would see it more clearly now.

The enshittification processes of academic and corporate structures are not entirely dissimilar, after all, as money is at the core of corrupting either.

[edanm]

I think, when making a gesture, you need to consider its practical impact, which includes whether and how it will be understood (or not).

In the OpenAI case, the gesture of "forgoing millions of dollars" directly makes you able to do something you couldn't - speak about OpenAI publicly. In the Grigory Perelman case, obviously the message was far less clear to most people (I personally have heard of him turning down the money before and know the broad strokes of his story, but had no idea that that was the reason).