Impossible to know what is going on, really. The Forbes article makes it sound like there is significant investment pressure in trying to get Altman back on board, and they likely have access to the board. It could very well be that the board themselves have no desire to bring Altman back, but these conversations ended up being the origin for the story that they did.

It's also possible that the structure of the non-profit/for-profit/operating agreement/etc. just isn't strong enough to achieve the intent and the investors have the strangehold in reality.

If I was invested in the mission statement of OpenAI I don't think I would view the reinstatement of Altman as a good thing, though. Thankfully my interest in all of this is purely entertainment.

There were many ways in which the board could have fired Altman without making waves. They utterly f'd that up, and even if their original reasons were good the way they went about it made those reasons moot. They may have to re-instate Altman for optical reasons alone at this point and it would still be a net win. What an incredible shit show.

[delayed]

OpenAI is not a public company but it does have a commercial arm and that commercial arm has shareholders and customers. You don't do damage to such a constellation without a really good reason (if only because minority shareholder lawsuits are a thing, and acting in a way that damages their interests tends to have bad consequences if they haven't been given the opportunity to lodge their objections). To date no reason has been given that stands up to scrutiny given the incredibly unexpected firing of Sam Altman. It is of course possible that such a reason exists but if they haven't made it public by now then my guess it that it was a powerplay much more than some kind of firing offense and given Sam's position it would take a grave error, something that damaged OpenAI's standing more than the firing itself to justify it.

Optics matter a lot, even for non-profits, especially for non-profits nominally above a for-profit. Check out their corporate org chart to see how it all hangs together and then it may make more sense:

https://openai.com/our-structure

Each of the boxes where the word 'investor' or 'employee' is present would have standing to sue if the OpenAI board of directors of the non-profit would act against their interests. That may not work out in the long run but in the short term that could be immensely distracting and it could even affect board members privately.