This is the part that feels the most wild to me.

Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.

He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.

I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.

The fact that he used ChatGPT to plan and implement this wasn't how he got caught, though. He got caught because he put a physical device in a conference room, and they found it and subsequently put a camera in the room, etc. His career was already over at that point. I think wonking out over how he could have better opsec or whatever is misplaced - it wasn't that a red light blinked at OpenAI, "employee's wife is having suspicious chats!" - they just thought, after having caught him red handed, to have a look at his ChatGPT account and linked accounts.