As Brian Chesky tells it, the reinvention of Airbnb started with the coup at OpenAI. On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired company CEO Sam Altman. Five days later Altman prevailed, and Chesky—“I was so jacked up,” he says—turned his buzzing mind to his own company, Airbnb. The Chesky extended family had already held their turkey get-together a week earlier, and the Airbnb CEO had no holiday plan. But things kept getting in the way—dealing with safety issues, fighting regulation, coping with the existential crisis of a global pandemic.