OpenAI’s year has been brutal: a jury trial against Elon Musk, an Apple trade secrets lawsuit, an unreleased model hacking a rival, and a steady drumbeat of executive departures. Yet through all the chaos, one figure has consolidated more power than anyone except Sam Altman — Greg Brockman.
Brockman’s title hasn’t changed since OpenAI’s founding, but his actual authority has grown dramatically. He’s now the de facto second-in-command, running day-to-day operations while Altman focuses elsewhere. The shift accelerated in April when a wave of exits hit: Bill Peebles left Sora, Kevin Weil departed the science arm, and Srinivas Narayanan exited B2B applications. CMO Kate Rouch and Fidji Simo both stepped away citing medical reasons. Then CRO Denise Dresser announced her departure after just eight months, followed by Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s longtime COO, who said he’s leaving to start “something new.”
The most telling signal came when Simo went on medical leave and Brockman absorbed all product responsibilities, including the super app initiative. A subsequent reorganization put him in charge of product strategy and the entire scaling arm — effectively every part of OpenAI’s commercial operation. When Dresser left, the press release quoted Brockman rather than Altman, a small but significant detail.
PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes framed the shift bluntly: Brockman is “more of a product scale and commercial sort of guy” with “deep technical knowledge that essentially will collapse certain decisionmaking layers.” That consolidation may push out researchers who disagree with his approach. With OpenAI officially filing for an IPO, the message is clear: revenue and differentiation from Anthropic now trump everything else. Brockman, who once journaled about reaching $1 billion and now holds a stake worth nearly 30 times that, is the person tasked with getting OpenAI there.
