Apple recently filed a 41-page lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets. The startling part is not a missing drawing or manufacturing process. It is another number Apple put in its own complaint: OpenAI now employs more than 400 former Apple employees.
Apple should find out why its files allegedly left the building. The harder question is why so many people wanted to leave with them.
First, the facts. Apple alleges that two former employees took hardware development materials to OpenAI. OpenAI has denied any interest in other companies’ trade secrets, and the case has not been decided. The “more than 400” figure refers to former Apple employees across OpenAI, not the “400 hardware engineers” claimed in some online retellings. Apple separately says OpenAI’s hardware group went on to recruit dozens of its engineers. Those are different numbers. Together, they still sting. How does a team with no announced product and no proof that its bet will work lure dozens of engineers away from the most successful hardware company in the world?
Apple may recover the files. It won’t recover the people.
A complaint can itemize what Apple says it lost: prototypes, parts, CAD files, supplier information, manufacturing processes. Each item can become evidence. Someone can be held responsible for taking it.
A company’s pull on talented people does not fit on an evidence list.
The best people rarely choose a company for salary alone, and a contract is not what makes them stay. They give a company several years of their lives because they believe something new will happen there.
We do not know why each of those 400-plus people left. It would be absurd to claim they all went to OpenAI to build hardware. But dozens of Apple engineers did choose a hardware project that has yet to show a product or prove a market. Their willingness to go is the number Apple has to answer for.
That is the cruel part. If secrets leave, lawyers can chase them. If people’s expectations have moved elsewhere, no stack of legal paper can bring them home.
Apple faced another poaching problem twenty-one years ago
In May 2005, Adobe had hired one Apple employee and was approaching others.
Apple was nowhere near today’s giant. According to historical market-cap records, its value at the end of 2005 was one seventy-seventh of what it is now. The iPhone did not exist. Apple was still the challenger climbing back into relevance.
At 9:36 a.m. on May 26, Steve Jobs emailed Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen directly. The subject line was one word: “Recruiting.”
The entire message read:
Bruce,
Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don’t recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
Steve
The email is memorable, but not because it is short. The exchange that followed is what gave those few lines weight.
At 4:15 that afternoon, Chizen replied that he thought the agreement covered senior employees, not everyone. A little over two hours later, Jobs answered: fine, then he would tell Apple’s recruiters that anyone at Adobe below senior director or vice president was available. Had he understood correctly?
The next evening, Chizen backed down. He proposed that neither company actively recruit any employee from the other, though either could speak with someone who approached first. His last line was: “If you agree, I’ll inform our people.” The full exchange is preserved in the public email record.
That is where the record ends. We cannot see Jobs’s final reply. We can see what he did from the first message: he refused to let the matter dissolve into a vague principle. He turned it into a choice that required an answer. Which company was going to change?
The email mattered because a person stood behind it
Anyone can write a terse email. Anyone can sound tough for six lines. The hard part is being ready to live with what those lines set in motion.
When Chizen said ordinary employees were outside the deal, Jobs did not continue debating the fine print. His answer was simple: if that is your rule, Apple will use it too. Are you sure?
That was Jobs’s Apple. It was not always kind, and it was certainly not always right. But when there was no established answer, everyone knew who would make the call, who would say it plainly, and who would own the cost.
Apple in 2005 was worth one seventy-seventh of Apple today, yet there is no small-company hesitation in that email. Jobs did not sound certain because he had more evidence. He sounded certain because he was willing to put his judgment on the table first.
This is what charisma looks like inside a company. It is not a black turtleneck, applause at a keynote, or an executive trying to sound ruthless. It is one person’s judgment passing through an organization until it becomes the company’s position.
One email and one lawsuit show what Apple has become
The current case is about alleged theft of trade secrets, not simply recruiting. Apple is entitled to sue. A CEO’s email cannot replace legal process, and it would be silly to rank a short note above a lawsuit as if they were competing pieces of writing.
But documents do more than settle disputes. They leave traces of a company’s character.
Read the 2005 email and you instantly know what Apple will not accept. You know who made the decision and what Apple will do if the other side refuses. Read the 41-page complaint and you will understand exactly what Apple says was taken. You will have a much harder time hearing where Apple wants to go.
That is not the complaint’s job. Still, beside the figure of 400 former employees, the silence becomes unsettling. Today’s Apple can state with precision which pieces of the past belong to it. It has not shown the same clarity about the next thing it must build.
Of course Apple needs process. A company worth trillions cannot run on one man’s temper. Process makes the supply chain steadier, catches product mistakes, and lets every department produce a defensible answer.
The new things that matter rarely begin with a defensible answer. They begin before the data is sufficient, before a precedent exists, before anyone can promise they deserve to exist at all. Process can document the risk with exquisite care. It cannot decide whether the company should take it.
Apple gets almost everything right. Why does that feel wrong?
Today’s Apple is vastly stronger than Apple in 2005. It makes world-class chips, operates a formidable supply chain, sells products and services at a scale few companies can touch, and employs lawyers capable of pursuing every alleged leak line by line.
It gets almost everything right. But improving what already works and choosing the next thing worth risking the company on are two different abilities.
The first gets better through expertise, coordination, and process. The second eventually lands on a person. Someone has to speak before the evidence is complete: we are doing this, and if it fails, the failure is mine.
Jobs’s Apple concentrated that power in one person. The cost was high and the risks were real. Today’s Apple distributes risk through a far tighter institution. Its worst outcomes are less disastrous. But the nerve to move before certainty arrives has become harder to find too.
Apple was small in 2005, but its employees could believe the future would grow inside it. Apple is now one of the largest companies on Earth, yet it needs 41 pages to remind others which parts of the past belong to Apple.
What people miss is not Jobs’s talent for sending blunt emails. They miss an Apple with a clear “I.” That Apple could be unreasonable, wrong, and exhausting. But it knew what it wanted and accepted responsibility for the answer.
Apple’s real danger is not that the next secret might leave the building. It is that the future might happen somewhere else. The increasingly repetitive keynotes and still-growing profits make that question easy to postpone. They do not make it disappear.
Companies rarely begin their decline by doing something obviously wrong. They begin when everyone inside is rewarded for doing only the correct thing.
Apple is starting to look like one of them.