They did compromise. The creation of the for-profit and Sam being brought in WAS the compromise. Sam eventually decided that was inconvenient for him, so he stopped abiding by it, because at the end of the day he is just another greedy VC guy and when push came to shove he chose the money, not OpenAI. And this is the result.
Its frustrating to me that people so quickly forget about Worldcoin.
Sam is not the good guy in this story. Maybe there are no good guys; that's a totally reasonable take. But, the OpenAI nonprofit has a mission, and blowing billions developing LLM app stores, training even more expensive giga-models, and lobotomizing whatever intelligence the LLMs have to make Congress happy, feels to me less-good than "having values and sticking too them". You can disagree with OpenAI's mission; but you can't say that it hasn't been printed in absolutely plain-as-day text on their website.
Who knows how these shady deals go, even SBF claimed effective altruism. Maybe Sam wasn't in it for the money but more for "being the man", spoken of in the same breath as steve jobs, bill gates etc... for building a great company. Building a legacy is a hell of a motivation for some people, much more so than money.
OpenAI is set up in a weird way where nobody has equity or shares in a traditional C-Corp sense, but they have Profit Participation Units, an alternative structure I presume they concocted when Sam joined as CEO or when they first fell in bed with Microsoft. Now, does Sam have PPUs? Who knows?
