That's nonsensical. The reason he was fired was a power struggle between Ilya and Sam. Period. They have different visions for how to achieve AGI, and Ilya is an idealist who wants to try to do it with a small research organization. He has no clue how much capital it takes to achieve what they're trying to do.
With regard to the rest, Russia isn't a race, Ilya was born there, and the real decision came from Ilya. Everybody knows this. If Altman comes back, Ilya will be out. What does that tell you?
The instant this little stunt was pulled, money became a problem. You see, a startup is funded by two streams of capital: revenues, and venture capital. Revenues are, like all startups, insufficient to fund the company, so that leaves VCs. Guess who is flipping the hell out right now trying to force Altman back? That's right, the venture capitalists. If they don't get their way, they will pull their capital, and your hero will have precisely enough capital necessary to fund the operations of a hotdog stand.
True, but nation of origin dies not in fact predict ethnicity. You know how I know this? I'll tell you my nation of origin: USA. Now tell me my ethnicity. You can't. What I said was perhaps a stereotype (a humorous one that gets used in any situation where someone acts like their stereotypical origin, you see it is what's known as an idiom) of people from Russia, but it is not racist. I don't even know Ilya's ethnicity.