I mean.. what would it even mean to have equity in a non-profit?
Non-profits are organized fundamentally differently than for profit corporations.
If anything they should have had equity in the for-profit side of the company to ensure that their incentives were aligned, if that is even your point.
I think it brings up a very interesting test case for how this particular kind of ownership structure can fail. In another thread, it strikes the difference between authority and power, which I think was very clearly made here.
That all being said, it seems like things have taken a turn for the worse, and if anything, this board has set the mission of a truly open AI world even further back. There seem to be some real Luddites on the board who seem to think they'll some how be able to cram Pandora back in the box after it has well escaped control. If anything, the should swing the gate wide and at least open source the everything else so as to prevent Microsoft from having a complete monopoly on the future of AI (how things seem to be shaping up).
The kind of ownership is pretty normal across a wide range of industries, a lot of hospitals in the US operate with a similar structure, NGOs and "foundations," co-ops, independent regulators, etc. Whatever's happening in this case is remarkable but probably not because of how the board operates in this role specifically. We have to know why they fired him to know what's going on but that's unlikely. It could have been completely mundane but that doesn't matter now.
I'm more sympathetic with the (non-profit) board this time. Sam Altman feels like bad news to OpenAI, really. It's more like the workers rally behind Sam Altman because they can get fat paychecks and bail out once the enshittification intensifies.
They're not supporting him because they're worried about his finances. They're supporting him because they have faith in his leadership. If they didn't, they wouldn't care. Lots of CEOs are just empty suits, but Altman clearly has been doing something his workers liked.
From my understanding, Sam Altman is the one pursuing profits, and the non-profit board is the one that was overseeing it being done "safely." If this is the case, it is the non-profit board that should be rallied for.