hack: do a startup only after you already have living money assured (savings from earlier corporate jobs, now invested & producing). you have time & energy, and no obligations.
pure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't. now there's a big looming liability.
spending $4B for ironsource ads and $1B for weta authoring stuff was expensive and took lots of their more indie-friendly choices off the table. maybe the ipo path they took made these things inevitable. anyways, their choices are behind them now. godot and elsewhere are where the parade will move on to