Never assume someone is winning a game of 5D chess when someone else could just be losing a game of checkers.

I highly doubt this was a coordinated plan from the start by Microsoft. I think what we're seeing here is a seasoned team of executives (Microsoft) eating a naive and inexperienced board alive after the latter fumbled.

what does that even mean?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

OpenAI may just be a couple having an angry fight, and M$ is just the neighbor with cash happy to buy all the stuff the angry wife is throwing out for pennies on the dollar.

He is saying that what might seem like a sophisticated, well-planned strategy could actually be just the outcome of basic errors or poor decisions made by someone else.

In this case, it means that what happened is: “OpenAI board is incompetent”, instead of “Microsoft planned this to take over the company.”

A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially considering the board members might loose their seats and their own market value.

Hanlon's razor, basically.

The most plausible scenario here is that the board is comprised of people lacking in foresight who did something stupid. A lot of people are generating a 5D chess plot orchestrated by Microsoft in their heads.

In other words - it doesn’t have to be someone’s genius plan, it could have just been an unintelligent mistake

I think it means don't attribute to intelligence what could be easily explained as stupidity?

Nah, It's just good to be the entity with billions of dollars to deploy when things are chaotic.