In the turmoil around the firing and rehiring of former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, many people have looked to OpenAI’s complex governance structure, which marries its original nonprofit mission with a rapidly growing for-profit company now generating revenue at a pace exceeding $1 billion a year.

OpenAI’s structure is indeed complex: It is a nonprofit that owns a holding company that owns the majority of a for-profit company but controls that for-profit company through another limited liability company that the nonprofit also owns. What’s more, Microsoft owns a piece of the for-profit company, but employees and other investors own a piece of the holding company that owns the for-profit (and not the for-profit itself).