And the winner is… the man from Redmond!

The mind-boggling soap opera now unfolding at OpenAI after its board decided on Friday to sack its co-founder, Sam Altman, via videoconference, and the subsequent departure of its CEO, Greg Brockman, took a new twist when the company’s leading partner, Microsoft, said on Monday that while it maintains its full support for OpenAI and looks forward to meeting Brockman’s successor, Emmett Shear, it has asked Altman and Brockman to join Microsoft to lead a new artificial intelligence research team, an offer they have accepted.

Meanwhile, almost all of OpenAI’s employees have signed a letter calling on the board to resign for having created this pig circus by firing Altman in the first place, saying that if Altman and Brockman are not reinstated, they will go to the new subsidiary created by Microsoft, which has apparently assured them there is room for everyone. At the head of the signatories is Mira Murati, who after being appointed last Saturday as interim CTO after Altman’s firing, was himself replaced after spending the weekend trying to persuade Altman to return. And if those employees don’t want to go to Microsoft, they could still accept the offer from Salesforce, that has also promised to keep their salaries and compensate their capital participations. Clearly, the most important assets of a knowledge-based company are not the buildings, servers and software, or cash on…