Fidji Simo steps down from OpenAI’s no. 2 role
Quick Answer
Fidji Simo is stepping down from her role as OpenAI's No.
Quick Take
Fidji Simo is stepping down from her role as OpenAI's No. 2 executive due to ongoing health issues, transitioning to a part-time advisory position. Her departure raises concerns for CEO Sam Altman as OpenAI prepares for a potential IPO and seeks to close the gap with competitors like Anthropic.
Key Points
- Simo joined OpenAI in May 2025 as CEO of Applications, consolidating business operations.
- She has been on medical leave since April due to a neuroimmune condition relapse.
- Simo's exit creates a leadership gap as OpenAI eyes a potential IPO.
- Her focus was on growing OpenAI's consumer business, which missed revenue targets.
- Simo previously led Instacart through its 2023 IPO and spent over a decade at Meta.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readFidji 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 CEO Sam Altman 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.
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Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.
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— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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