Fiji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, will step down from his full-time position, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Simo said in a staff note Thursday that his ongoing medical leave has proven longer and more difficult than expected and he will instead transition to a part-time advisory role. Mr. Simo joined OpenAI’s Board of Directors in 2024 and joined OpenAI in May 2025 as CEO of Applications. A new role was subsequently created, reporting directly to Sam Altman, to integrate the company’s business and product operations.
Her appointment was accompanied by broader reporting changes. COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar and CPO Kevin Weil all now report to her, while Altman has stepped down to focus on research, computing and safety.
Simo first disclosed his health problems in April, when he announced that he would be taking medical leave due to a recurrence of a neuroimmune disease. In that same memo, it was publicly announced that Lightcap would be transitioning into a new “special projects” role and that CMO Kate Rouch would be leaving the company to focus on cancer recovery. After that, Mr. Weil also left the company.
Simo joins OpenAI from Instacart, where he served as CEO in 2021 and led the company through its IPO in 2023, before spending more than a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app.
With Simo’s decision to permanently exit the company, Altman will be looking for a successor while OpenAI itself turns its attention to the possibility of an IPO. This created a real void for him to address, as she was widely seen as a likely candidate to take on additional responsibilities once OpenAI went public.
Mr. Simo was primarily focused on growing OpenAI’s consumer business. But ChatGPT’s growth slowed late last year and it missed internal revenue goals, leading the company to instead focus more on its coding tools, an area that has and continues to lag Anthropic.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information.
Immediately after the Journal article broke, Simo shared the news directly on X, and Altman later responded on X, saying, “I’m really sad about this and I’m so grateful for everything Fiji has done for Opunai, and I appreciate her friendship and her character. We all wish her a speedy recovery. This sucks.”
Simo’s announcement comes on a busy news day for OpenAI. Earlier Thursday, the company announced new GPT-5.6 family models (Sol, Terra, Luna) and a new agent called ChatGPT Work, designed to handle multi-step office tasks such as document creation, spreadsheets, and presentations. Both releases were framed by OpenAI as directly targeting Anthropic.
From the outside looking in, OpenAI’s executive ranks look thin for a company that was most recently assigned an $852 billion valuation. In addition to Mr. Altman, Mr. Lightcap, Mr. Friar, and co-founder Greg Brockman (who is also president of the company and oversaw product strategy in Mr. Simo’s absence), the bench also includes Dennis Dresser. Dennis Dresser joined the company in December as chief revenue officer, overseeing “a global revenue strategy that spans enterprise and customer success,” according to a release at the time.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see Dresser take on a broader role, given that he previously served as Slack’s CEO for two years and before that spent 14 years at Slack’s parent company, Salesforce.
Simo’s departure stems from another context worth understanding: a change in OpenAI’s approach to employee equity. Last April, the same month Mr. Simo joined the company, the company reduced the vesting cliff (the waiting period before stock grants to new employees begin to vest) from the industry standard of 12 months to six months. And in December, OpenAI completely eliminated the new hire cliff, allowing you to start vesting your stock from day one.
The move, which Simo described internally as a way to let employees “take risks” without fear of losing capital if they are let go early, comes amid an intensifying war for AI talent and reflects how aggressively OpenAI has been spending money to retain its employees. The company was expected to spend $6 billion on stock compensation in 2025 alone.
None of the aforementioned withdrawals appear to have resulted in compensation. Management equity packages are typically negotiated separately and may have very different vesting terms.
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