As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tangles with Elon Musk, there’s one person on OpenAI’s nonprofit board who may have some hard-earned lessons to impart. That would be Bret Taylor, the longtime tech exec who was chairman of Twitter’s board when Musk made his hostile bid for the company in early 2022.
Taylor has a storied history in U.S. tech—he’s the cocreator of Google Maps, the onetime leader of the team that invented Facebook’s “like” button, a former co-CEO of Salesforce and now the cofounder of AI agent outfit Sierra. But it was in his capacity as a board member that the soft-spoken Taylor found himself pitted against the bombastic Musk.
