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Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s indoor golf league has been postponed one year after the organization’s venue’s roof collapsed.
TGL’s broadcast partner, ESPN, supports the decision.
The league has emerged as golf is at a major crossroads with the rivalry, and pending merger, between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf.

Tiger Woods of the United States and Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland walk to the 11th fairway during a practice round prior to the 2023 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club on April 03, 2023 in Augusta, Georgia. 
Christian Petersen | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images

Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s indoor golf league, TGL, has postponed its inaugural season by a year until the start of 2025, the organization said Monday.
The decision comes after the roof of the new arena slated to host TGL matches collapsed last week. The league said the power system used during construction of the SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida failed, causing a dome structure to deflate.

The accident did not cause injuries or damage the league’s golf simulators and other technology, TGL said. But TGL delayed the season, which was expected to start in January, after speaking to key partners.
“This decision came after reviewing short-term solutions, potential construction timelines, player schedules, and the primetime sports television calendar,” the league said in a statement. “We are confident that the extension will only improve our delivery.”
TGL, which counts the PGA Tour as a partner, was founded by McIlroy, Woods and former NBC executive Mike McCarthy. The trio wants to create a primetime indoor golf league to attract new fans to the sport at as the emergence of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, and then its proposed merger with the PGA Tour, left golf at a crossroads.
Woods was optimistic about the league’s future despite the delayed launch.
“Although the events of last week will force us to make adjustments to our timelines, I’m fully confident that this concept will be brought to life by our great committed players,” Woods said in a statement Monday.

TGL has drawn some of the best golfers in the world as part of its lineup. It’s unclear how the new timeline could affect player participation.
The league has also attracted a number of high-profile team owners and investors including hedge funder Steve Cohen, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, Fenway Sports Group, tech founder Alexis Ohanian and tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams. Other investors in the league include basketball great Stephen Curry, race car driver Lewis Hamilton, women’s soccer player Alex Morgan, singer Justin Timberlake and pro football’s Tony Romo and Josh Allen.
TGL signed a multi-year media rights deal with ESPN in October to broadcast its events.
ESPN said it fully supports the decision to postpone the 2024 season.
“We have believed in them and their vision from the beginning, and that has not changed. The additional time to plan, test and rehearse will only make it better, said Rosalyn Durant, executive vice president, programming and acquisitions at ESPN. More

The Biden administration said it is offering another round of free at-home Covid tests to American households ahead of the holiday season.
Starting Monday, Americans can use the site to request four additional tests per household.
Demand for tests and other Covid products such as vaccines and treatments has plummeted over the last year as cases and public concern about the virus dwindled from earlier in the pandemic. 

COVID-19 home test kits are pictured in a store window during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., January 19, 2022.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters

The Biden administration on Monday said it is offering another round of free at-home Covid tests to U.S. households ahead of the holiday season, when more people gather indoors and the virus typically spreads at higher levels. 
Starting Monday, Americans can use COVIDtests.gov to request four free tests per household. Those who have not ordered any tests this fall can now place two orders for a total of eight tests, according to the website.

The administration in September allowed people to request an initial round of four free tests through the site, resuming a federal program that temporarily shut down during a political fight over Covid funding.
At-home tests are a critical tool to protect against the virus, especially now that lab PCR tests — the traditional method of detecting Covid — have become more expensive and less accessible since the government ended the public health emergency in May. 
But demand for tests, along with Covid vaccines and treatments, has plummeted over the last year as cases and public concern about the virus dwindled from earlier in the pandemic. 

More CNBC health coverage

Only a small share of Americans appear to be worried about Covid disrupting their holiday plans this fall and winter.
About 3 in 10 Americans said they are concerned they will get seriously sick from Covid or will spread the virus to people close to them over the holidays, according to a poll released Friday by health policy research organization KFF. 

Less than half were concerned about the potential for another Covid surge during the winter, which has occurred in previous years of the pandemic, the poll said. 
Still, signs of a winter Covid wave are emerging.
More than 16,200 Americans were hospitalized in the week ending Nov. 11, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That marks an 8.6% increase from the previous week.
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“Choiceful” is CEOs’ new favorite word to describe consumer spending behavior and their own companies’ strategy.
So far in 2023, “choiceful” has appeared in 15 quarterly earnings calls for S&P 500 companies, up from just two in 2021, according to a CNBC analysis of FactSet transcripts.
Chief executives including Walmart’s Doug McMillon and McDonald’s Chris Kempczinski have used the adjective this year when talking to investors.

Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart Inc. Corporation, participates in a Business Roundtable discussion on the”Future of Work in an Era of Automation and Artificial Intelligence”, during a CEO Innovation Summit, on December 6, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Mark Wilson | Getty Images

“Choiceful” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but chief executives love it.
It’s how Walmart CEO Doug McMillon described the average consumer, who is trying to cut back on spending but is still willing to splurge on what’s worth it.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski used the word to characterize the company’s strategy on price increases.
And the adjective popped up again during Starbucks’ investor update, when CEO Laxman Narasimhan outlined the coffee giant’s strategy for general and administrative expenses.
So far in 2023, choiceful has appeared in 15 quarterly earnings calls for S&P 500 companies, according to a CNBC analysis of FactSet transcripts. That’s nearly double the usage last year, when it totaled nine mentions. In 2021, only the CEOs of Molson Coors and McCormick said “choiceful” when speaking to investors on their quarterly conference calls.

Chief executives have found it a useful adjective this year, whether it’s to describe today’s unusual economy or to reassure investors that they can steer their businesses through anything.
“Choiceful” can’t be found in Merriam-Webster Dictionary or on dictionary.com. But the Oxford English Dictionary notes the earliest known use of the word in the late 1500s. The adjective typically appears .002 times per million words in modern written English, making it one of a group of words “which are not part of normal discourse and would be unknown to most people,” according to the OED.

These days, CEOs have used it to describe a consumer whose behavior has changed over the last two years. Inflation has put pressure on their wallets, leading them to pull back on spending in some areas but not others.
Some companies have found themselves scrambling to explain why consumers aren’t buying their products or why inventory was piling up at retailers. Others, such as Ralph Lauren, have been beneficiaries of shoppers’ choosiness.
“I think that’s what consumers are looking for right now as they are more choiceful,” Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet told investors on the retailer’s Nov. 8 conference call. “They want to invest in pieces that are timeless, that they can wear beyond one specific season.”
The change in shopping habits has put pressure on some companies’ top and bottom lines, leading executives to emphasize the thoughtfulness of their strategies. That’s where “choiceful” comes in handy again.
Take Molson Coors’ portrayal of its restrained, targeted approach to nonalcoholic drinks. In recent years, the beer giant has begun shifting away from ales and lagers in favor of faster-growing categories, such as energy drinks.
“We’re going to be choiceful about where we play, and we have two priority spaces,” CEO Gavin Hattersley said at the company’s investor update Oct. 4.
Or there’s McDonald’s explaining its approach to hiking menu prices. Restaurants, like many other industries, have seen diners push back against higher prices by visiting less frequently or opting for cheaper orders.
“I think, certainly given the inflation that we’ve experienced over the last year — really more than a year — we’ve tried to be very choiceful and disciplined on how we have executed those price increases,” McDonald’s Kempczinski told analysts in late October.
Consumers are still feeling the sting of higher prices at McDonald’s and elsewhere. They’re racking up record credit card debt, even as inflation cools.
As 2023 comes to a close, economists are split on whether next year will bring a recession, which could mean even more dramatic challenges for CEOs to tackle.
Maybe they’ll even need to find a new favorite word.

Read more CNBC retail news More

There is little doubting the dedication of Sam Altman to Openai, the firm at the forefront of an artificial-intelligence (ai) revolution. As co-founder and boss he appeared to work as tirelessly for its success as at a previous startup where his singlemindedness led to a bout of scurvy, a disease more commonly associated with mariners of a bygone era who remained too long at sea without access to fresh food.  So his sudden sacking on November 17th was a shock. The reasons why the firm’s board lost confidence in Mr Altman are unclear. Rumours point to disquiet about his side-projects, and fears that he was moving too quickly to expand Openai’s commercial offerings without considering the safety implications, in a firm that has also pledged to develop the tech for the “maximal benefit of humanity”.The company’s investors and some of its employees are now seeking Mr Altman’s reinstatement. Whether they succeed or not, it is clear that the events at Openai are the most dramatic manifestation yet of a wider divide in Silicon Valley. On one side are the “doomers”, who believe that, left unchecked, ai poses an existential risk to humanity and hence advocate stricter regulations. Opposing them are “boomers”, who play down fears of an ai apocalypse and stress its potential to turbocharge progress. The camp that proves more influential could either encourage or stymie tighter regulations, which could in turn determine who will profit most from ai in the future.Openai’s corporate structure straddles the divide. Founded as a non-profit in 2015, the firm carved out a for-profit subsidiary three years later to finance its need for expensive computing capacity and brainpower in order to propel the technology forward. Satisfying the competing aims of doomers and boomers was always going to be difficult.The split in part reflects philosophical differences. Many in the doomer camp are influenced by “effective altruism”, a movement that is concerned by the possibility of ai wiping out all of humanity. The worriers include Dario Amodei, who left OpenAI to start up Anthropic, another model-maker. Other big tech firms, including Microsoft and Amazon, are also among those worried about ai safety.Boomers espouse a worldview called “effective accelerationism” which counters that not only should the development of ai be allowed to proceed unhindered, it should be speeded up. Leading the charge is Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm. Other ai boffins appear to sympathise with the cause. Meta’s Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng and a slew of startups including Hugging Face and Mistral ai have argued for less restrictive regulation.Mr Altman seemed to have sympathy with both groups, publicly calling for “guardrails” to make ai safe while simultaneously pushing Openai to develop more powerful models and launching new tools, such as an app store for users to build their own chatbots. Its largest investor, Microsoft, which has pumped over $10bn into Openai for a 49% stake without receiving any board seats in the parent company, is said to be unhappy, having found out about the sacking only minutes before Mr Altman did. If he does not return, it seems likely that Openai will side more firmly with the doomers.Yet there appears to be more going on than abstract philosophy. As it happens, the two groups are also split along more commercial lines. Doomers are early movers in the ai race, have deeper pockets and espouse proprietary models. Boomers, on the other hand, are more likely to be firms that are catching up, are smaller and prefer open-source software.Start with the early winners. Openai’s Chatgpt added 100m users in just two months after its launch, closely trailed by Anthropic, founded by defectors from Openai and now valued at $25bn. Researchers at Google wrote the original paper on large language models, software that is trained on vast quantities of data, and which underpin chatbots including Chatgpt. The firm has been churning out bigger and smarter models, as well as a chatbot called Bard.Microsoft’s lead, meanwhile, is largely built on its big bet on Openai. Amazon plans to invest up to $4bn in Anthropic. But in tech, moving first doesn’t always guarantee success. In a market where both technology and demand are advancing rapidly, new entrants have ample opportunities to disrupt incumbents.This may give added force to the doomers’ push for stricter rules. In testimony to America’s Congress in May Mr Altman expressed fears that the industry could “cause significant harm to the world” and urged policymakers to enact specific regulations for ai. In the same month a group of 350 ai scientists and tech executives, including from Openai, Anthropic and Google signed a one-line statement warning of a “risk of extinction” posed by ai on a par with nuclear war and pandemics. Despite the terrifying prospects, none of the companies that backed the statement paused their own work on building more potent ai models.Politicians are scrambling to show that they take the risks seriously. In July President Joe Biden’s administration nudged seven leading model-makers, including Microsoft, Openai, Meta and Google, to make “voluntary commitments’‘, to have their ai products inspected by experts before releasing them to the public. On November 1st the British government got a similar group to sign another non-binding agreement that allowed regulators to test their ai products for trustworthiness and harmful capabilities, such as endangering national security. Days beforehand Mr Biden issued an executive order with far more bite. It compels any ai company that is building models above a certain size—defined by the computing power needed by the software—to notify the government and share its safety-testing results.image: The EconomistAnother fault line between the two groups is the future of open-source ai. llms have been either proprietary, like the ones from Openai, Anthropic and Google, or open-source. The release in February of llama, a model created by Meta, spurred activity in open-source ai (see chart). Supporters argue that open-source models are safer because they are open to scrutiny.​ Detractors worry that making these powerful ai models public will allow bad actors to use them for malicious purposes.But the row over open source may also reflect commercial motives. Venture capitalists, for instance, are big fans of it, perhaps because they spy a way for the startups they back to catch up to the frontier, or gain free access to models. Incumbents may fear the competitive threat. A memo written by insiders at Google that was leaked in May admits that open-source models are achieving results on some tasks comparable to their proprietary cousins and cost far less to build. The memo concludes that neither Google nor Openai has any defensive “moat” against open-source competitors.So far regulators seem to have been receptive to the doomers’ argument. Mr Biden’s executive order could put the brakes on open-source ai. The order’s broad definition of “dual-use” models, which can have both military or civilian purposes, imposes complex reporting requirements on the makers of such models, which may in time capture open-source models too. The extent to which these rules can be enforced today is unclear. But they could gain teeth over time, say if new laws are passed.Not every big tech firm falls neatly on either side of the divide. The decision by Meta to open-source its ai models has made it an unexpected champion of startups by giving them access to a powerful model on which to build innovative products. Meta is betting that the surge in innovation prompted by open-source tools will eventually help it by generating newer forms of content that keep its users hooked and its advertisers happy. Apple is another outlier. The world’s largest tech firm is notably silent about ai.  At the launch of a new iPhone in September the company paraded numerous ai-driven features without mentioning the term. When prodded, its executives lean towards extolling “machine learning”, another term for ai.That looks smart. The meltdown at Openai shows just how damaging the culture wars over ai can be. But it is these wars that will shape how the technology progresses, how it is regulated—and who comes away with the spoils. ■ More

SpaceX launched its Starship rocket into space on Saturday, with Elon Musk’s company pushing development of the towering vehicle past new milestones.
It flew for several minutes before an unknown issue triggered the intentional destruction of the rocket. No people were on board this test flight.
The Federal Aviation Administration will oversee a “mishap” investigation into the flight, a standard regulatory procedure, before SpaceX can launch another Starship rocket.

SpaceX launched its second Starship rocket flight on Saturday, with Elon Musk’s company pushing development of the mammoth vehicle past new milestones.
Lifting off around 8 a.m. ET from the company’s facility in Texas, Starship flew for more than seven minutes, successfully separating from its booster before the rocket’s onboard system intentionally destroyed the vehicle mid-flight.

No people were on board the test flight.
“We have lost the data from the second stage … what we do believe right now is that the Automated Flight Termination System on the second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn,” John Insprucker, SpaceX principal integration engineer, said on the company’s webcast.

SpaceX’s next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket lifts off from the company’s Boca Chica launchpad on an uncrewed test flight, near Brownsville, Texas, U.S. November 18, 2023. 
Joe Skipper | Reuters

The flight termination system is a standard safety feature in rockets, as it destroys the vehicle if a problem arises or it flies off course. On SpaceX’s webcast, Starship appears to have been detonated at an altitude of about 148 kilometers (or about 485,000 feet). That is a little under half the altitude at which the International Space Station orbits the Earth.
The intentional destruction of Starship represents a premature end to the flight test, as SpaceX planned to fly it most of the way around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.
“An incredibly successful day, even though we did have a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ both of the Super Heavy booster and the ship,” SpaceX quality engineering manager Kate Tice said on the webcast.

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it will oversee a “mishap” investigation into the flight, a standard regulatory procedure, before SpaceX can launch another Starship rocket.
Mishap investigations are how the FAA analyzes the cause of a rocket launch failure, especially when a vehicle is destroyed. The regulator may give SpaceX corrective actions to complete before the company can receive a license for future Starship launches. The FAA said in a statement after the launch that “no injuries or public property damage have been reported.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the company for making “progress on today’s flight test.”
“Spaceflight is a bold adventure demanding a can-do spirit and daring innovation. Today’s test is an opportunity to learn—then fly again,” Nelson said in a social media post.
The FAA cleared SpaceX for the second launch earlier this week.

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SpaceX first launched a full Starship rocket system in April. Although that flight did not reach space, it successfully achieved multiple historic firsts for an experimental rocket of unprecedented scale. The mid-air destruction of the rocket, as well as an investigation into damage caused back on the ground, triggered a regulatory review that spanned nearly seven months.
The launch attempt comes on the heels of renewed backlash against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over comments he made online. The White House on Friday condemned what it called “abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate” by Musk on his social media platform, X.

Starship system

Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Heavy booster, Starship stands 397 feet tall and is about 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, which stands 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket’s journey to space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust – about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which launched for the first time late last year.
Starship itself, at 165 feet tall, has six Raptor engines – three for use while in the Earth’s atmosphere and three for operating in the vacuum of space.

The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The full system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
Musk previously said he expects the company to spend about $2 billion Starship development this year.

Goals for second flight

There were no people on board this attempt to reach space with Starship. The company’s leadership has previously emphasized that SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
SpaceX was looking to surpass the nearly 4-minute flight of the first launch, reach space with Saturday’s attempt and demonstrate that improvements to its ground infrastructure mitigate the damage caused by the debut attempt.
During the April launch, SpaceX lit only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines at the base of the Super Heavy booster. Other engines were lost mid-flight. Additionally, a communications problem led to an unexpected delay in triggering the rocket’s Autonomous Flight Termination System, which destroys the vehicle in the event it flies off course.
SpaceX introduced upgrades to the launch pad infrastructure as well as the design of the rocket itself for the second attempt. More

Airlines expect the most air travelers ever this holiday season.
Cheaper airfare than last year is providing some relief to consumers after prolonged inflation.
Thanksgiving will be a test to see how the aviation industry handles the year-end holidays while still managing strains.

Travelers wait in line to check in for their flights at a Delta Airlines ticket counter at Orlando International Airport during the busy Christmas holiday season on December 28, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.
Paul Hennessy | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Airlines expect record travel demand this Thanksgiving. Executives say they’re prepared for the hordes.
The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 30 million passengers from Nov. 17 through Nov. 28, the most ever. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is expected to be the busiest day during that period with an estimated 2.9 million passengers taking to the skies.

“We are ready for the anticipated volumes and are working closely with our airline and airport partners to make sure we are prepared for this busy holiday travel season,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a travel forecast earlier this week.
The year-end holidays are a crucial time for airlines to drum up revenue. Outside of peak holiday or other high-demand periods, carriers have turned to discounting fares or scaling back growth as consumers’ frenetic post-pandemic travel settles back to historical norms. Meanwhile, carriers are facing higher fuel and labor costs that have eaten into their profits.
But coveted travel days around the holidays can still command steep fares.
And Thanksgiving will be a test to see how the aviation industry handles the year-end holidays while still managing strains like a prolonged shortage of air traffic controllers.
The holiday period kicks off nearly a year after a winter storm triggered thousands of flight cancellations around Christmas. Carriers have spent months preparing to ensure that costly missteps don’t reoccur.

Weather readiness is particularly key for Southwest Airlines, which canceled 16,700 flights late last year and in early 2024 following severe winter weather, while other airlines recovered more quickly. The Dallas-based carrier has been spending on increasing aircraft de-icing capabilities and improving technology to better reschedule crews during flight disruptions.
“If your crew is on a three-day rotation and they don’t get out day 1, guess what, day 2, day 3 they’re not there,” Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told reporters at the Skift Aviation Forum in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this month. “An airline always has to keep moving. An airline stops moving, and bad things happen.”
Prep isn’t limited to Southwest.
“We start winter readiness in the summer,” said United Airlines Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo. “We have some of our first meetings when thermometers are at their highest.”
United has also been upgrading a series of self-service tools in its mobile app to help customers rebook themselves during flight disruptions, as well as real-time flight information. The carrier last month also launched a new boarding order in economy — window seat, middle, then aisle — that Jojo said will shave about two minutes off of enplaning.
Those extra two minutes “just helps that flight and the next flight and the next flight,” she said.

More flights, (some) better fares

The Federal Aviation Administration expects Thanksgiving flights to peak at 49,606 on the Wednesday before the holiday, up from the holiday peak last year of 48,192. (The busiest day of 2023 so far was June 29 with nearly 53,000 flights.)
Delta Air Lines said it alone expects to carry between 6.2 million and 6.4 million passengers from Nov. 17 to Nov. 28, compared with 5.7 million last year and 6.25 million in 2019.
United expects to fly 5.9 million passengers from Nov. 17 to Nov. 29, up 13% from last year and 5% more than 2019, and American Airlines expects to fly a record 7.8 million travelers from Nov. 16 to Nov. 28, up from 7 million last year and beating out 2019 by roughly 200,000 passengers.
Many fares ahead of Thanksgiving were lower than last year as airlines increased service in recent months, a relief for many consumers who have been facing higher interest rates and inflation.
Thanksgiving flight deals are averaging $248 for domestic round trips according to flight-tracking site Hopper, down from $271 last year and $276 in 2019, months before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Overall, airfare was down more than 13% in the latest U.S. inflation report, according to the Department of Labor. More

HOW QUICKLY the mighty fall. Ever since the release of ChatGPT a year ago, Sam Altman has been the human face of the generative artificial-intelligence revolution. As recently as November 16th the co-founder and boss of OpenAI was touting the virtues of AI to executives and world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco. The very next day he was out on his ear. A blog post on OpenAI’s website said the board “no longer has confidence” in Mr Altman’s leadership because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”. Another shock came hours later. Greg Brockman, chairman of the firm’s board and another co-founder, resigned in response to Mr Altman’s sacking.The defenestration was all the more surprising because Mr Altman seemed at the peak of his powers. He had recently completed a world tour where everyone from Narendra Modi to Emmanuel Macron jockeyed to meet him. On November 6th he had launched a suite of new AI tools at OpenAI’s developer day, drawing comparisons with Steve Jobs—a parallel that now seems ironic, considering that in 1985 Jobs too was booted out of the company he had founded. One startup boss says Mr Altman’s and Mr Brockman’s departures are as serious as if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been kicked out of Google during its early years.OpenAI’s employees and investors were blindsided by the move. Mr Brockman later tweeted that he and Mr Altman had not been aware of what was happening until minutes before the ousting. According to Axios, a news website, Microsoft, which has a 49% stake in the firm, was also in the dark until the last minute. Microsoft’s stock fell by 2% on the news, probably because the firm’s AI ambitions, including a hotly anticipated “copilot” for its Office suite, hinge on access to OpenAI’s technology.The ousting raises three big issues: what led to the surprise sacking; what it means for the firm that has been at the frontier of generative AI; and what it means for the future of the technology itself. How OpenAI’s employees, the tech world and society writ large respond to the situation will be critical to what happens next.The board has yet to offer a detailed explanation for its decision. The leading theory, put forward by Kara Swisher of New York Magazine, says that the rest of the board, assembled by chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, disagreed with Mr Altman on how the firm should balance making money with the safe release of its models. An employee at OpenAI flatly calls the situation a “coup d’état”. In a meeting with employees held shortly after the announcement, though, Mr Sutskever denied this characterisation, saying that the board was just doing its duty.If it is true that Mr Altman’s defenestration resulted from disagreements over AI safety, it would be the most dramatic expression yet of a longstanding debate at the heart of OpenAI’s history and indeed the wider industry. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 by Mr Altman, Mr Brockman and Mr Sutskever, a superstar AI researcher, among others. But in 2019, in need of cash to train models that were demanding ever more computer power, Mr Altman spearheaded the creation of a “capped-profit” company inside the non-profit and raised $1bn from Microsoft. In 2021 a handful of senior employees at the firm grew disillusioned with the firm’s more commercial focus and left to form a rival startup called Anthropic. The launch of ChatGPT was only one chapter in Mr Altman’s quest to turn what was once a tiny research lab into a nimble product-oriented company.What does Mr Altman’s ousting mean for OpenAI? The immediate effect is chaos. In addition to Mr Brockman, three other senior engineers have left. Others could follow, especially if the ousting resulted purely from a strategic disagreement. There could also be financial repercussions. Speaking to your correspondent in August, an investor in OpenAI called Mr Altman the “only irreplaceable person” at the startup because of his top-notch recruiting and fundraising abilities. “Sam is the greatest fundraiser of all time…after Elon,” he said. But perhaps OpenAI no longer needs Mr Altman to hire staff and raise money, now that the firm is so well known, and has the backing of Microsoft. That is why the departure of Mr Brockman, widely considered the engineering brains of the startup, is even more stinging.OpenAI is currently in talks to raise funds at a valuation of nearly $90bn, which would make it one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world. A private-markets broker says that before the announcement there had been “nothing but demand” for OpenAI’s shares. That valuation will now be tested, he says.The impact on the wider industry is less clear. Mr Altman pushed OpenAI to “ship” new products into the world which gave it a first-mover advantage. Its competitors were forced to move faster to keep pace. A more safety-focused OpenAI will therefore slow down the whole industry, allowing competitors to catch up. AI startups that were building products with OpenAI’s technology may now think twice before tying themselves too closely to one company. And Mr Altman himself is a wildcard. Writing on X he promised he would “have more to say about what’s next later”. If what’s next is a new company, the drama could just be getting started.■ More

Investment firm JAT Capital wants the board of the new Bed Bath & Beyond to answer its questions and be more transparent.
The firm, which has a 9.6% stake in the company, accused Beyond of twisting the facts about former CEO Jonathan Johnson’s ouster.
“I have never seen such poor behavior by a Board in my career,” JAT’s founder John Thaler wrote in an open letter.

Signage is displayed outside a permanently closed Bed Bath & Beyond retail store in Hawthorne, California, on May 1, 2023. 
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Investment firm JAT Capital sent a scathing letter to the board of the new Bed Bath & Beyond on Friday saying it has refused to answer questions from shareholders and is engaging in what the investment firm called unprecedented “poor behavior.” 
The firm, which has a 9.6% stake in the company and claims it is not an activist fund, excoriated the board for a series of misdeeds, including canceling planned investor conferences and twisting the facts about former CEO Jonathan Johnson’s ouster.

“We have attempted to engage constructively with investor relations, senior management and the Board of Directors in recent months, making suggestions of best practices that might preserve and enhance value, and more recently pointing out actions taken by management and the board that appear to be destroying shareholder value,” the letter, penned by JAT’s founder John Thaler, states. 
“We have taken the more active posture with Beyond because, quite frankly, I have never seen such poor behavior by a Board in my career. The things that I have heard, the things that have been spoken directly to me, and the actions I have witnessed are in a category that I have never seen.” 
Beyond was previously known as Overstock.com, which bought Bed Bath out of bankruptcy and rebranded. Prior to its rebrand, Beyond had been grappling with sluggish sales and a dwindling market cap. After its first quarter as the new Bed Bath, results were mixed with steep declines in sales and profits. 
The company didn’t return a request for comment.
Earlier this month, JAT called on Beyond to fire Johnson. Days later, the company announced he was stepping down.

In its letter, dated Friday, JAT questioned why Johnson’s board seat was removed after his ouster and said it was an attempt to weaken “shareholders ability to have a say.” The firm also accused the board of being disingenuous about Johnson’s decision to leave the company and said bluntly that he’d been “fired.”
“Rather than terminating Johnson and publicly saying so (a statement that would have been well received by everyone involved), the Board decided to craft a press release along with Jonathan suggesting that he had stepped down, and even making the ludicrous statement that he and the Board had jointly concluded that ‘now was the ideal time’ for a leadership transition,” the missive reads.
“Now is the ideal time? In the middle of a company re‐branding effort, just as the company embarks on a $150 million marketing campaign? And that coincidentally coincides with shareholders calling for Johnson’s removal? Writing a press release that twists the facts and makes disingenuous characterizations of the situation … furthers the perception that the Board is engaged in self‐preservation and inside dealing.”
Meanwhile JAT has called for Marcus Lemonis, the Camping World CEO and TV personality who starred in CNBC’s “The Profit,” to take over management of the company. He joined the Overstock board last month and has cheered its transition to Beyond Inc. 
JAT renewed those calls in Friday’s letter and accused the board of being “suspicious” of Lemonis, pushing him to the sidelines and refusing his expertise. 
“In one of the few instances where I have been able to engage with a member of the Board on the subject of why Marcus Lemonis wasn’t being permitted to help manage the business, [chair of the board] Allison Abraham acknowledged to me that she (and others) were worried that ‘Marcus has a secret nefarious plot,'” the letter states. “She has allegedly repeated this same concern to the interim CEO Dave Nielsen. When pressed on what that ‘nefarious plot’ might be, she acknowledges that she doesn’t know.” 
Lemonis didn’t return a request for comment.
JAT called on Beyond’s board to answer its questions, once and for all, and for everyone from vendors to sell-side analysts to demand more transparency.
“It is my strong desire that the Board be forced to explain what it is doing. This is not an unreasonable ask. The actions cited below which the Board has taken in the last 60 days appear to be to the detriment of the company and shareholders,” the letter states. “This Board has refused to explain why they have made these decisions.”
Read the full letter below: More