Fidji Simo Steps Down From Full-Time OpenAI Role, Becomes Part-Time Adviser

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications and its No. 2 executive, is stepping down from her full-time role after a three-month medical leave for a chronic illness, moving to a part-time advisory role as three executives absorb her duties.

Technology

uristocrat

July 9, 2026 2 min read

Fidji Simo Steps Down From Full-Time OpenAI Role, Becomes Part-Time Adviser — Fidji Simo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Key Points

Fidji Simo is leaving her full-time OpenAI role for a part-time advisory one.
She told staff on July 9 that her chronic illness had worsened during a three-month leave.
Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, was its No. 2 and led product and business.
Her duties pass to three executives; Greg Brockman ran product during her leave.

Fidji Simo, the executive Sam Altman hired to run OpenAI's commercial and product operations, is stepping down from her full-time role. In a note to staff on July 9, Simo said the chronic illness that forced her onto medical leave in April had worsened, and that her recovery would be longer and more complex than expected. She will remain with the company as a part-time adviser, TechCrunch reported.

Simo has lived with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) for seven years; a severe flare in April sent her on leave and handed product oversight to co-founder and president Greg Brockman. "Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness," she wrote in a post on X, adding that she needed to focus on her health fully. Her responsibilities as CEO of Applications — the division built around ChatGPT's consumer and business products — will be split among three senior executives, Bloomberg reported.

The read: Simo was the professional-operator hire, brought in from Instacart to give OpenAI's sprawling product and revenue machine an adult in the room as it scaled toward a public listing. Losing her full-time is a real gap at a delicate moment. The company is confidentially filing for an IPO at a valuation few companies have ever approached, and she is the second health-driven C-suite departure this year after CMO Kate Rouch stepped back. Layered on engineering churn like Andrej Karpathy's exit to Anthropic, it extends an unusually fast reshaping of OpenAI's leadership just as investors want to see it settle. The human story comes first, a serious illness handled with unusual transparency, but the business consequence is that OpenAI heads toward its IPO without the operator it recruited to steady it.

Source: TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Axios.