quotation · first recorded 2023 · status: canon
Directionally very bad
1.Deadpan corporate-speak for catastrophic. From the text Mira Murati sent Sam Altman during his November 2023 ouster from OpenAI; now used for anything that is bad and getting worse.
Shipping the pricing change on a Friday without telling support was, directionally, very bad.
01Origin
November 2023, the OpenAI board crisis. Sam Altman, freshly fired, texted then-CTO Mira Murati - his eyes and ears inside the company - asking her to "indicate directionally good or bad" about where things stood. Her reply: "Directionally very bad." And then, in case the vector needed a magnitude: "Sam this is very bad."
The texts surfaced in 2026 as evidence in the federal trial over Elon Musk's lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI, with Murati's deposition pulling back the curtain on the ouster weekend. X metabolized the exchange instantly - the phrase "entered the lexicon" (Business Insider), the texts were set to a 2011-style emo love song, someone asked how to make it into a Halloween costume - and it now applies to missed deadlines, job rejections, and wilting produce alike.
The construction stuck because it is perfect corporate-SF dialect: it launders an emotional catastrophe through the language of a metrics review. Nothing in San Francisco is ever simply a disaster; it merely trends unfavorably. From the same leaked exchange: rando Twitch guy.
02Notable sightings
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