Your premise requires that the acting board actually thought OpenAI would implode. The board very obviously did not think this outcome would happen. They have been in chaos and scrambling ever since precisely because they badly miscalculated the outcome of firing Altman.

Alternatively: slow down and or roll back the commercialization of GPT, especially with regards to the just announced GPTs (nice coincidence on timing that this happens right after that, as it directly threatened Poe). Poe benefits hugely in that scenario. The ideal outcome for Poe is to hamstring GPT's commercialization; develop the models, artificially restrain the commercialization, leave that to Poe. People do not always act or think rationally. They can be and often are wrong in their estimations. Otherwise smart people can make exceptionally dumb choices.

Ooops, I didn't mean for that chain of events to happen: history in a nutshell.