Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, is stepping down from her full-time role, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In a staff note Thursday, Simo said her ongoing medical leave has proven longer and harder than expected, and that she’ll transition to a part-time advisory role instead. Simo joined OpenAI’s board of directors in 2024 and joined OpenAI in May 2025 as CEO of Applications, then a newly created role reporting directly to Sam Altman that consolidated the company’s business and product operations.
That move was integrated into a wider reporting shift: COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil all began reporting to her, while Altman stepped back to focus on research, compute, and safety.
Simo first disclosed her health issues in April, when she announced she was taking medical leave for a relapse of a neuroimmune condition; it was in that same memo that it was share publicly that Lightcap moved into a new “special projects” role and CMO Kate Rouch was leaving the company to focus on cancer recovery. Weil has since left the company, too.
Simo came to OpenAI from Instacart, where she’d been CEO since 2021 and led the company through its 2023 IPO, and before that spent over a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app.
Simo’s decision to step back permanently leaves Altman searching for a successor right as OpenAI itself eyes a possible IPO and races to close the enterprise gap with Anthropic. She’d been widely seen as a likely candidate to take on even more responsibility once OpenAI went public, making this a real gap for him to fill.
Simo was primarily focused on growing OpenAI’s consumer business. But ChatGPT’s growth cooled late last year, missing internal revenue targets, pushing the company to lean harder into coding tools instead, an area where it has been and continues, for now, to trail Anthropic.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information.
OpenAI’s executive ranks appear from the outside to be on the thin side for a company that was most recently assigned an $852 billion valuation. In addition to Altman, Lightcap, Friar, and co-founder Greg Brockman (who is also the company’s president and was overseeing product strategy while Simo was out), its bench includes Denise Dresser, who in December joined as the company’s chief revenue officer, overseeing its “global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success,” per a release at the time.
It wouldn’t be shocking to see Dresser take on a more expansive role, given she previously spent two years as the CEO of Slack and, before that, spent 14 years with Slack’s parent company, Salesforce.
Simo’s departure come against another backdrop worth understanding, which is OpenAI’s shifting approach to employee equity. In April of last year, the same month that Simo joined, the company shortened its vesting cliff — the waiting period before new hires’ stock grants begin vesting — from the industry-standard 12 months to 6 months. Then n December, OpenAI eliminated the cliff altogether for new hires, letting equity start vesting from day one.
The move, described internally by Simo as a way to let employees “take risks” without fear of losing equity if let go early, came amid an escalating AI talent war and reflects just how aggressively OpenAI has been spending to retain staff. The company was projected to spend $6 billion on stock-based compensation in 2025 alone.
None of the aforementioned exits appear tied to compensation; Simo’s own equity would have cleared any cliff well before the policy changed.
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