Greg Brockman is quietly becoming the most powerful person at OpenAI

Key points

• Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and co-founder, now oversees product strategy, the company's entire commercial operation, and its scaling arm after a string of executive departures in 2025.
• At least eight senior OpenAI executives have left since April 2025, including the chief revenue officer and longtime chief operating officer.
• OpenAI filed paperwork to list its shares on a public exchange in 2025, putting pressure on the company to show it can generate profit, not just research breakthroughs.
• The pace of departures is unusual even by pre-IPO standards and could raise questions from public investors.
• Brockman's stake in OpenAI is currently worth close to 30 billion dollars.

Greg Brockman has not changed his job title. He is still OpenAI's president and co-founder, the same words that have appeared next to his name for years. But what those words cover has quietly expanded until he now runs almost everything that is not in CEO Sam Altman's hands.

It did not happen in a single announcement. It happened through a steady chain of departures.

Who has been leaving, and why does it matter?

Since April 2025, OpenAI has lost at least eight senior leaders. They include Kevin Weil, who ran the company's science arm; Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI's AGI deployment division; chief revenue officer Denise Dresser; and Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's long-serving chief operating officer, who said he would leave to start "something new." We broke the Lightcap exit on 11 August and followed two days later with Dresser's departure and her replacement.

Each exit, as first reported by The Verge, shifted a little more authority toward Brockman. When Simo went on medical leave in April, Brockman took over all product decisions, including the company's work on a so-called "super app," a single application meant to handle many tasks. A month later, after OpenAI reorganised internally around revenue growth, his authority expanded to cover the company's entire commercial side.

A telling detail came in the press release about Dresser's departure. The quote included in that statement came not from Altman but from Brockman himself.

What does this mean for OpenAI as a business?

OpenAI is preparing for an IPO, meaning it is getting ready to sell shares to ordinary members of the public on a stock exchange for the first time. Before that happens, the company needs to make its finances look as clean as possible.

Consolidating control into fewer hands cuts costs. Senior executives at a company like OpenAI can earn enormous salaries, so fewer of them means lower expenses. "When you're going into an IPO, you want to decrease those expenses so that this way, you're either more profitable or closer to profitable," said Ross Carmel, a partner at law firm Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, speaking to The Verge.

Carmel added a caution: while some executive turnover before a stock listing is normal, "the fact they're all in this small time period, that part is unusual."

Brockman's background explains why Altman handed him these responsibilities. His strength has always been translating research into products people actually pay for. Back in 2020, he described OpenAI's GPT-3 text model as "the first time that we've had a general-purpose AI system that's immediately commercially valuable." With a stock listing approaching and rival Anthropic competing hard for enterprise customers, OpenAI needs someone who can build consumer products that bring in direct revenue.

"In order for OpenAI to be successful and really differentiate from Anthropic, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers," Carmel told The Verge, "and that's what Greg does well."

Brockman pushed back on any suggestion of instability. Appearing on CNBC's Squawk Box, he said: "I'm a constant, Sam is a constant, and I think we are stronger because of that resilience."

What should investors and employees watch for next?

Analysts expect a visible consumer product before the end of September 2026 to prove Brockman can deliver, not just manage. That's the real test: OpenAI has never lacked for impressive research; it now needs a revenue line that justifies a public valuation.

For anyone who works at OpenAI, the consolidation has a blunt practical meaning. PitchBook senior research analyst Harrison Rolfes told The Verge: "Whatever he says goes now. If you're below Brockman and you don't agree with his approach, you're going to leave."

For people who might invest when OpenAI's shares become available, the core question is whether the company can build an institution that does not depend entirely on two individuals to function.