They founded OpenAI on the explicit premise that advanced AI poses existential risks to humanity, and that a non profit structure was essential to prioritize safety over profits. They reaped major benefits from this status, including tax exemptions, easier talent recruitment (by appealing to mission-driven researchers), and massive donations.
Then, once GPT models exploded in value, making the for-profit arm worth tens of billions, they attempted to restructure toward a public company model to let investors and insiders cash out at scale, while claiming the non-profit board would still "control" the direction. This directly contradicts their original charter, which warned that profit motives could lead to unsafe AI racing.
Now it is clear that we are nowhere near AGI, and hence they have to make money from making fake tiktok videos and smut. And they just want to cash out because the original premise won't deliver. Specifically it was very disingenuous and that is why people hate it.
i.e: it was a complete grift.