For a counter example of what open and transparent communincation from a C-level tech person could look like, have a read of what the SpaCy founder blogged about a few months ago:
Stakes are orders of magnitude lower in spaCy case compared to OpenAI (for announcer and for people around them). It's easier to just be yourself when you're back on square one.
https://honnibal.dev/blog/back-to-our-roots