A CEO getting fired, not by the for-profit company's Board, but by a board with a public mission, right after said company released a groundbreaking product that captured the popular imagination and then turned that into a multibillion dollar deal with Microsoft (which in turn parlayed into trillions of dollars of wealth across the economy), is absolutely news.
You’re also ignoring the biggest aspect: that these employees would never do that for the actual people doing the real work. The employees got played, the public got played, the media got played.