Heart emojis, confusion, and a wave of support for Sam Altman. Here's what OpenAI employees are saying about Altman's shock ousting.

• OpenAI employees are having a tough time after Sam Altman was suddenly ousted from the company.
• Some staffers have threatened to quit if Altman is not reinstated as CEO.

OpenAI employees are having a wild ride.

Since Friday the company has cycled through three CEOs: cofounder Sam Altman, former CTO Mira Murati, and current CEO Emmett Shear, who cofounded Twitch.

Altman's ousting by the company's board came as a shock to employees and investors. Several staffers quickly followed the former CEO in parting ways with the company.

Altman along with former OpenAI president Greg Brockman and prominent researchers including Aleksander Madry have all joined Microsoft after a chaotic weekend of back and forth with OpenAI's board.

More OpenAI staffers have threatened to join them unless Altman is reinstated and the board resigns.

In a letter to the board signed by nearly 500 employees, staffers wrote: "Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."

The threat is unlikely to be a major shock to OpenAI's leadership.

Employees haven't been shy about their support for their suddenly dismissed chief. Staffers flooded X with hearts over the weekend, showing support for each other and departing cofounders Brockman and Altman.

One OpenAI employee, Will Depue, said on Saturday: "Hard to express how much I look up to Sam and Greg. Really crushed to see them go and no longer have the opportunity to work for them."

Throughout the night on Sunday, more OpenAI staffers spoke out, sharing the repeated message: "OpenAI is nothing without its people."

Some employees went even further, openly criticizing the board and taking aim at OpenAI's chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly had a major role in ousting Altman.

Shengjia Zhao, a research scientist at OpenAI, slammed the company's chief scientist in a now-deleted post on X. He said: "Ilya does not care about safety or the humanity. This is just ego and power hunger that backfired."

Jan Leike, who co-leads OpenAI's alignment team with Sutskever, also openly called for the board to resign in a post on X, with multiple fellow staffers then following his lead posting identically worded messages.

Others have simply expressed their confusion.

Andrej Karpathy, who was the senior director of AI at Tesla before rejoining OpenAI in 2023, said in a post on Sunday: "I like and respect Sam and I think so does the majority of OpenAI. The board had a chance to explain their drastic actions and they did not take it, so there is nothing to go on except exactly what it looks like."