Transcription
This is a warning for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Alman's open AI. Sam Alman, he comes across as a a master manipulator, like masterful manipulator and understander of human psychology.
"You have an incredible amount of power at this moment in time. Why should we trust you?"
"Um, you shouldn't."
It's 2005 and Sam Alman is 19 years old. He drops out of Stanford, co-founds a location sharing app called Looped, walks into his first pitch meeting as a teenager, and walks out with $5 million. What he could do from day one was tell a story and raise money. Investors asked the only question that mattered. How many people are using looped? Altman said 50,000. The real number though was 500. When news outlets published the real number, Altman pushed back, said they were wrong, and promised proof. The proof, well, that never showed up. But the money sure did. Green Dot Corporation, a prepaid debit card company, bought Looped for $43 million. They bought it for the patents and the engineers. The app was shut down immediately. Investors who'd funded the product saw little to nothing in return. Altman turned 500 users in an idea into a $43 million exit and walked away with millions. Green Dot's own investors later alleged the deal had been structured to benefit insiders. And this would be a sign of things to come.
In fact, this is how Sam Alman would later describe himself. "The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift."
After Looped, Alman lands at Y Combinator, the startup factory behind Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. The idea was simple. You apply with an idea, they give you money and connections, and if you're good enough, you can create a company worth billions. He works his way up to president and he gets to see hundreds of startups before the market knows they even exist. He makes a promise he won't personally invest in these companies through his own private fund, Hydroine Capital. Yeah, not really because Hydroine starts investing anyway. One person described the culture Alman built as all about prioritizing what's in it for me.
In 2019, Paul Graham cut an overseas trip short and flew from the UK to San Francisco specifically to remove Altman as president. Sources said Alman's attention is somewhere else. Open AI. The tension had been building for years. In 2015, Altman had used his position at Y Combinator to launch YC Research, a new nonprofit arm, and donated $10 million of his own money to fund it. Open AAI was its first project. So when Graham flew back to remove him, the side project Alman had been prioritizing was built inside Y Combinator using Y Combinator's resources while he was running Y Combinator. Graham had told colleagues afterwards that Sam had been lying to us all the time. Graham had also once written that you could parachute Alman into an island of cannibals and come back in 5 years to find him king. And even his own brother described Altman's childhood personality as "I have to win and I have to control everything."
In 2015, OpenAI launches with language that is foreign to a place like Silicon Valley nonprofit. The organization's mission was a primary fiduciary duty to humanity and a commitment to avoiding any concentration of power. A dinner at the Rosewood Hotel in Palo Alto started it all. Sam Alman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and others gathered over a shared fear. Google was pulling too far ahead in AI, and nobody else was building a counterweight. Musk picks up much of the early tab, and Open AI is born.
And here's the interesting thing. Altman isn't really even a technologist. He never was. According to engineers who later worked with him at OpenAI, Altman couldn't even code. A New Yorker investigation published in April of 2026 revealed that Alman confuses basic AI terminology in technical meetings and lacks experience in programming and machine learning. Like a self-proclaimed chef who can't cook but knows how to fill the dining room. One tech executive who worked with him said he's unbelievably persuasive. "like Jedi mind tricks. He's just next level."
The same year at a late night gathering at Peter Teal's house, Alman meets the man who would later become his husband. And Teal, who has a lot of issues, would be a major player in Altman's life.
From day one of Open AI, Altman holds a financial stake in almost everything the company needs to survive. Data, power, infra. He owns a large share of Reddit and arranges for OpenAI to scrape everything ever posted on it. Basically using Reddit to train OpenAI. He chairs Helon's board, a nuclear fision startup needed for power. He sits on Oakllo's board, which currently runs on natural gas, while figuring out the actual reactor part. Eventually, he would step down from Oaklo's board to clear the path for OpenAI to sign energy deals with his own companies. Former OpenAI board members would later write that Alman had cultivated a toxic culture of lying inside the organization he was running on humanity's behalf as he publicly claimed.
By 2017, someone else wanted control of Open AI. Elon Musk, one of the most powerful men in the world, wanted, of course, more of it. To be fair though, he earned some of the credit. He did help fund it and he personally recruited Ilia Sutzkver, Google's top AI mind, away from his main target. At the time, Elon framed Open AI as a save the world mission, and Google was enemy number one. Sam Alman later called him a talent magnet who gave OpenAI the credibility to hire the world's best engineers. And of course, Elon would go out of his way to make sure he let everyone know who he thought was responsible for Open AI.
"I am the reason Open AAI exists."
He proposed merging Open AI into Tesla, taking over as CEO, taking majority equity, and having full board control. Sam Alman, well, obviously he refused. Musk threw a temper tantrum and walked off in 2018 and told the OpenAI team their probability of success was 0%. Then he announced plans to build his own competitor. But Elon's story wouldn't end in 2018. More on that later.
Alman then announced that OpenAI would shift from nonprofit to forprofit. Without Musk's money, he scrambled to find investors. Reed Hobman helped plug the leak, but then a major player would emerge. July 22nd, 2019, Microsoft announces a $1 billion investment into OpenAI. Only weeks prior, Microsoft's CTO Kevin Scott sent an email to Satia Nadella and Bill Gates. The subject line, thoughts on Open AI. The email was basically a four-page panic attack. He told them Microsoft was way behind Google and AI and their smartest people didn't have the resources to catch up. So Satia steps in with the first of many billions to come. Bill Gates even warned him that he was going to burn this billion dollars, but Satia did it anyway. And the two needed each other. Altman needed the money, Satia the technology.
Buried inside the Microsoft deal is a clause around artificial general intelligence. AGI is the idea that one day AI won't be just a tool. It'll think on its own. That's the holy grail. That's what all these AI companies really want. AGI. And the first company to achieve it, well, they'd be considered the winners in this multi-billion dollar race. Now, here's where that billiond dollar Microsoft deal gets interesting. The contract says Microsoft gets access to all of OpenAI's technology until OpenAI achieves AGI. The moment they reach it, Microsoft gets cut off. So, the most important question in the entire deal becomes, "How do you know when you've actually built it?" You'd think it would be a technical milestone, some breakthrough moment. Nope. According to reporting, Open AAI and Microsoft agreed that AGI is achieved when the technology generates $100 billion in profit. That's it. The mission of OpenAI, the reason the nonprofit, by the way, was created, the thing that Altman flies to Washington to testify about, well, it has a dollar amount definition, not a technical one.
At the time, a researcher named Daario Amade was running safety at OpenAI. He'd written something into the company's charter called the merge and assist clause. Basically, if another organization or company finds a safer path to AGI first, Open AAI will stop competing with them and start helping them instead. It meant Open AI would put humanity first, even if it meant giving up the race. That was the whole point of being a nonprofit. Daario ranked that clause as his number one demand in the Microsoft deal. Before the deal, he showed that clause along with the list of safety requirements to Altman. Altman agreed to it. But when the deal was about to close, Daario discovered something that had been quietly added. A provision giving Microsoft veto power over that clause. Meaning even if someone else found a safer path to AGI, Microsoft could block OpenAI from helping. Daario confronted Altman. Altman denied the provision even existed. So Daario pulled out the contract and read it to him out loud to his face. And even in that moment, Alman still denied it. In his private notes, Daario wrote that 80% of the charter had just been betrayed. He also later wrote that, "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself." Dario would leave OpenAI and go on to start a new company called Anthropic.
November 30th, 2022, Chat GPT goes live. No major big event or goofy tech marketing campaign. Just a website. You type it in and it answers. Within 2 months, it becomes the fastest growing consumer product in history. Inside Silicon Valley, Google calls Code Red. Executives pull engineers off other projects. One website just changed the road map for trilliondollar companies. And Chad GPT wasn't some polished finished product either. It was a rapper, a thin interface on top of an existing model. There was no grand strategy or fully built product roadmap. Just let people try it. The board didn't even approve the launch. They found out the same way everyone else did on social media. Inside OpenAI, even the people building it didn't understand what they had.
In late 2022, Altman told the board certain features in an upcoming model had cleared an internal safety review. Board member Helen Toner requested the documentation and found out that the most controversial features hadn't been approved at all. For most people, the story ends with, "And then it worked, so who cares?" A product launched without board visibility, without internal alignment, without safety sign off, without a revenue model. If it fails, it's on the board. But if it succeeds, then he gets the credit.
Now, if you listen to Altman, he'll say he has no equity in Open AI.
"One of the things I've always been fascinated by is you never took equity in the company."
"I think you think about that more than I do."
"Um I'm surprised you you get paid $76,000. I looked. Um"
"I believe you."
"And that's it. If the company does have one of these moments, there's an expectation you will get some equity. There was a bunch of press about that and there's been like some investor pressure. It is. Look, it is weird that I didn't get equity."
"Did you want it? You didn't want it? No, I didn't want it."
But what he conveniently leaves out is why that benefits him. Openai's nonprofit board was required to have a majority of independent directors, meaning directors with no financial stake in the company. By holding no equity, Altman qualified as independent, which gave him more control over the company's direction with fewer shareholders to answer to. And while he holds no stake in OpenAI itself, he holds significant stakes in almost everything OpenAI needs to function. Like a property developer who claims he has no financial interest in a new shopping mall. Sure, he doesn't own them all, but he owns the construction company that built it, the energy company powering it, the land it sits on, and the data company that tracks every customer who walks through the door. He profits from every angle without ever appearing on the ownership documents. So, he gets to keep telling people he has nothing to gain. His net worth is estimated over $3 billion. None of it comes directly from OpenAI shares. All of it grows when Open AI grows.
November 17th, 2023. Formula 1 Grand Prix weekend in Las Vegas. Alman is in his hotel room when a Google meet link arrives. The entire board stares back at him. Ilia Sutskiver, Adam D'Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha Macaulay. Every board member except Greg Brockman. The message is simple. You're fired. The board of the company building the most advanced AI in human history fires its CEO on a Google product. Well, at least it wasn't done on Teams.
"I never got to watch any race that whole weekend. Uh I was in my hotel room, took this call. I had no idea it was going to be and got fired by the board and it was just this like it felt like a dream. I was like I was confused. It was chaotic. It did not feel real. It was like like obviously like upset and painful but confusion was just like the dominant emotion at that point. It was like then in the next like half hour my phone I got so many messages that iMessage like broke on my phone."
Just weeks earlier at a birthday party Peter Teal had reportedly pulled Altman aside and warned him to watch his back. When the board fired Alman, they released a corporate statement saying he wasn't consistently candid. That's corporate speak for he lied a lot. Greg Brockman, the co-founder and board member not involved in the firing, wasn't even told what was happening. And once he found out, he quit on the spot. Ilia Sutsker, the guy who actually built the tech, eventually put together a 70page burn book on Sam Alman documenting years of internal slacks and HR records. It starts with just one word, lying. Alman told the board he didn't really have any financial stake in the Open AI startup fund when in reality he basically owned the whole thing. He kept them so far out of the loop that they actually found out about the chat GPT launch on Twitter. Imagine being legally responsible for the most important tech company on Earth and you're getting your company news from a social media feed like everyone else. And when the board confronted him, walked him through the documented pattern of deception item by item, Alman's response was pretty simple. "I can't change my personality."
The board miscalculated one thing. Alman had spent years building powerful friendships in Silicon Valley. His first call is to Brian Chesy, Airbnb CEO, a founder Alultman had mentored at Y Combinator over a decade earlier. Chesy tells him to fight back and Satia Nadella was reportedly furious. He immediately announced that he was hiring Alman to lead a new Microsoft AI research team. The move applied maximum pressure on the board to reverse its decision. Nadella and Altman co-wrote press statements over text during the chaos. Within hours, the coup became a spectacle.
"Some 500 of these 700 odd employees threatening to quit the company. Just explain what's going on here and why this weekend's um moves were so significant. It is hard to keep up with what has been one of the most spectacular corporate fallouts I think I can remember really in terms of a board firing a CEO very suddenly seeing the fallout from investors but also within the company. And this is just the latest. This is a letter to the board of directors of OpenAI. Uh as you mentioned, over 500 employees have agreed to this and these are their terms. They say they will take this step imminently unless all current board members resign and reinstate Sam Olman and Greg Brockman."
Employees knew what the board knew and signed anyway. They knew that, yeah, sure, he could bend the truth and manipulate people, but they also knew he was charismatic, could motivate people, and felt that he was leading them in the most important technological shift in the world, something that will reshape civilization and reshape their bank accounts because, let's face it, they knew he could make them rich. The board quickly folded. Ilia Suskiver even posts publicly, "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm Open AI." 5 days after the coup, Altman walks back through the door as CEO.
May 14th, 2024, Altman posts one word on X her. The Spike Jones film with Scarlett Johansson voicing an AI, a film Altman had publicly called a direct inspiration for Chad GPT's future. That says a lot. Johansson reveals Altman approached her to voice the actual system called Sky. She said no. So he tried again. 2 days before the live demo, his team contacts her agent again. She didn't respond. The demo that went live anyway.
"me. The announcement is about me. Well, color me intrigued. Are you about to reveal something about AI or more specifically about me as a part of Open AI?"
And people immediately noticed that it sounds exactly like her. So, she releases a statement. "I was shocked, angered, and in disbelief that Mr. Alman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference." Alman said Sky was never meant to sound like her. Johansson immediately lawyered up and if you know her track record, she does not mess around. Open AAI eventually pulled it. Johansson later told the New York Times that Sam Alman might make a good Marvel villain, maybe with a robotic arm.
December 9th, 2024, Open AI reveals Sora and it blows up the internet. People can't believe how fast the technology has advanced. Hollywood goes into full panic mode, predicting doom for their industry, and YouTube gets flooded with AI slop. Well, some of it was actually pretty funny.
"You want to know the truth? I ain't got no dreams no more. I am the dream."
"Did he just say that?"
"Crowd is pretty sparey to THIS CROWD. YOU ARE NOT SEEING THINGS. ALBERT EINSTEIN IS WALKING TO A WWF RING."
"DUDE. You just came through the ceiling."
"Just relax. Breathe out. I'm going open up that joint. Take some pressure off the ankle. Easy. Ready? Here we go."
"Sir, stay in the vehicle for me. All right."
"Sorry, officer. We got to get to 2015. Hey, wait. Dispatch, unit 12, vehicle fleeing northbound on Sycamore."
"HEY, WHAT THE THAT'S CRAZY. THIS IS MADNESS. WE MUST LEAVE NOW."
But not everything was funny. Fake war footage, deep fakes, and some really gross videos were made because the internet can be a cesspool. And if you give certain people tools to make anything they want, well, you get some very disturbing stuff that would get this video pulled by even mentioning it. Sora becomes the buzziest thing online, and Alman calls it a new creative era. Disney even signs a multi-billion dollar deal. 200 plus characters licensed, plans for Disney Plus integration, internal tooling, the whole thing. They've actively been building with it. On a Monday morning though, Disney's team is in a meeting with Open AI working on a Sora related project. 30 minutes after that meeting ends, they get another call. Oh, by the way, Sora, yeah, that's being shut down. Less than an hour later, the public announcement goes out. Alman personally calls the Disney CEO and says he feels terrible. Now, how could the hottest app that just signed a billion-dollar deal with one of the largest companies in the world just shut down within 15 months? Well, because Sora was burning about $15 million a day. At that rate, Disney's entire investment gets smoked in months. Inside OpenAI, teams are competing for compute. Every GPU hour Sora uses is one not going to something else. So it has to get cut. The Sora team then gets reassigned to focus on robotics. Yes, Open AAI is working on robotics.
A few years earlier, OpenAI had partnered with another company called Figure Robotics. They spent a year in weekly collaborative sessions. Figures team sharing proprietary methods, showing their progress, you know, two companies building together. Then one day, Figures CEO Brent Adcock gets a call, partnership over. Adcock would later say that OpenAI's team added zero value, that Figures people ran circles around them, that getting Open AI staff to actually show up was a persistent challenge, and that the only thing Openai had was a brand name and funding access. The collaboration, according to him, produced almost nothing. Well, produced nothing for figure, sure, but it did give OpenAI a full year of watching their work up close before breaking up with them.
And that's the pattern with Sam Alman. Make a big splashy announcement or launch, hype it up, and hope it works out. So, they take on Amazon by launching instant checkout, a feature that lets people buy things directly inside of Chat GPT. And it's hyped as the future of AI shopping, but it was buggy and it didn't work, so it gets killed within the year. Then they take on Google with an AI web browser called Atlas. Altman hyped it up as a once-ina decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be. Well, maybe he should have rethought taking on Google because even internally, teams complain the company is spreading itself too thin across many apps. Atlas gets folded into a super app. It's still available, but hard to find anyone actually using it. Nvidia announces a hundred billion investment commitment. It helps juice a stock rally. But just months later, the deal gets quietly renegotiated down to something way smaller. 2 weeks after that Nvidia headline, a near identical deal gets announced with AMD. Headlines. Got to get those headlines.
And then there's the super secret and hyped up Open AR hardware device from legendary Apple designer Johnny IV. Altman acquires his startup for $6.5 billion. Alman wants to replace the phone with an AI device and claims they'll ship a 100 million units faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.
"Johnny recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home and I've been able to live with it and I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen."
Yeah, except news reports behind the scenes say that development is going badly. It's been delayed multiple times. No one has even seen a demo and the team can't solve basic problems. When the device should talk, when it should shut up, where the computing power is going to come from, it's always the same. Day one does its job. Big splashy hyped up announcement. But by day 200, yeah, it's someone else's problem.
Follow the money around AI and you keep running into Sam Alman. The chips, the data centers, the power to run them, the pipes the whole thing flows through. He has stakes in all of it. So when AI grows, he doesn't just win once, he gets paid at every step along the way. "Remember, Sam Wman's been around the block. I've known him since Loop. He's an incredibly savvy person, and he wants every bit of revenue from the ecosystem. He is taking no prisoners. He's going to study how you're using the API, which he has the right to do."
Sam Alman comes from the Zuckerberg School of Business, which is give dumb people access to your tools. Study them. Now, flip it. AI starts breaking things. Scams get easier. Fake videos get better. Then you need businesses to fix that mess. Things like identity checks, verification, and even insurance against AI fraud. Well, guess what? He's invested there, too. And if AI wipes out jobs, which yeah, that's already happening. Companies save money by cutting people, great for them, not so great for everyone else. That creates a new problem. How do you prove you're a real person in a world full of bots? And how do you plug people into a new system when the old one disappears? That's where his other big bet comes in, Worldcoin. It's a global ID system tied to a crypto token. You line up, look into a shiny metal ball, it scans your eyes, and now you're verified. If that system becomes standard, every new user, every new check, every new transaction runs through something he helped build. MIT researchers looked into how this rolled out. Teams showing up in parts of Indonesia, Kenya, Sudan, Ghana, offering cash or tokens in exchange for eye scans. Governments started pushing back. Kenya ordered the data deleted. Spain, Germany, Brazil, France, India, all open investigations. Edward Snowden's take was simple. Don't catalog eyeballs.
So, if AI works, he wins. If AI breaks things, no problem. He sells the fix. And if humanity all goes to no problem. He's already planned for that, too.
In 2017, before Chat GPT, Alman wrote a blog post called the merge. He argued that humans and AI are already fusing, that our phones control us and social algorithms decide how we feel. Well, technically he does have a point. His conclusion though, we either merge with the machines or get left behind as a dead branch on the evolutionary tree. And just listen to how he talks about AI in the future.
"You know, I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, uh, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."
It just fills you with optimism, doesn't it? But he knows what's coming because buried somewhere in the Navajo desert is his bunker. Yes, his actual underground bunker stocked with supplies, food, medicine, and even weapons. So the man preparing for civilizational collapse is also simultaneously trying to raise $7 trillion to accelerate it.
In early 2024, Altman went on a world tour asking for somewhere between 5 and 7 trillion to reshape the global semiconductor industry. $7 trillion. The Wall Street Journal called the ask outlandishly large by the standards of corporate fundraising. Yeah, that's one way to put it. Altman though, yeah, he called it securing our collective future. Meanwhile, OpenAI projected a $14 billion loss.
"How, you know, how can a company with 13 billion in revenues make 1.4 trillion of spend commitments, you know, and and and you've heard the criticism, Sam."
"We're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. You know, I I just enough like"
"they don't expect their first profit until 2029. But in Silicon Valley, revenue doesn't really matter."
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no revenue. I'll call you back. What? Why would you go after revenue? Because we to make money. No. If you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. the company that was the 100x or the thousandxer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue. You're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about what you're worth and who's worth the most companies that lose money."
Some analysts actually project they'll run out of money by 2027 and see OpenAI as a ticking time bomb ready to implode. Meanwhile, Chad GPT has seen a sharp decline in market share and user growth. Apple shifted Siri to use Google's Gemini models. And Google, by the way, which invented the transformer architecture that made Chad GPT possible in the first place, has more than caught up.
And then there's Anthropic, led by Daario Amade, the guy who read a safety provision aloud while Altman lied to his face. Well, he left OpenAI and founded Anthropic, a company built on the principle that safety and capability weren't in conflict. And a product called Claude, which is now threatening to replace Chat GPT. Developers who use both say that Claude is more careful and reliable. And when both companies faced the same choice, the difference between them was pretty clear. Both OpenAI and Anthropic were already working with the Department of Defense. But when the Pentagon demanded full unrestricted access to their AI models to spy, track, and kill, oh, I mean, uh, for mass domestic surveillance, and fully autonomous weapons, Anthropic said no. The Pentagon, of course, they got petty and labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, a designation normally reserved for foreign enemies, never before used against an American company. But Sam Alman had no problem signing that government deal, though. More than 200 employees from Google and OpenAI signed an open letter supporting Anthropic. Altman's own employees publicly sided with the competition. So Alman was forced to admit the deal was sloppy and rushed. He also said he miscalibrated the mood of distrust toward AI and the government in the Pentagon deal.
Something else he miscalibrated. "I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. Yeah, I guess they hit last resort pretty fast because the nonprofit founded to protect humanity from dangerous AI, ran by a guy with an underground bunker who says AI will probably end humanity, who had no problem signing a deal with the government to hand over its technology without safeguards, is now bringing ads to chat GPT. That's what's called in shitification. You start with a useful, affordable service to get users hooked. And then once people are locked in, you jack up prices, cut costs, and blast out ads. It's basically how every platform ends up monetizing its market share power. The difference with OpenAI, though, is they're trying to skip straight to the final phase before they've actually won.
OpenAI's own CFO, Sarah Frier, had been internally warning that the company won't be ready for an IPO in 2026. So, how does Alman handle that? Well, by reportedly excluding her from certain conversations about the company's financial plans. The CFO of the company being excluded from financial planning. Typical Almond playbook though. Keep the inconvenient truths in a different room.
According to an investigation by the New Yorker, former Open AI employees and advocates who had spoken to Congress or the press began receiving unexpected visitors. Representatives from OpenAI showed up at their homes. According to one person targeted, they wanted names. Every former employee he'd spoken to, every congressional office he'd contacted, every potential investor he'd approached. The New Yorker investigation, over a 100 interviews, never before disclosed memos, 200 pages of internal documents asked one question. Sam Alman may control our future. Can he be trusted? One former open a board member's answer, he's unconstrained by truth. He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone. Aaron Schwarz, the coder and activist who shared Y Combinator's inaugural 2005 class with Alman, warned a close friend before his death in 2013, "You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything." A senior executive at Microsoft speaking to the New Yorker said, "I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Maidoff or Sam Bankman freed level scammer." By the way, here's a fun fact. Sam Olman raises cattle in Napa on weekends and he happens to be a vegetarian, which again, the irony. The guy may not eat the product, he just owns it.
March 17th, 2026, Sam Alman posts, "I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character by character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point." And immediately he gets roasted online again. Remember this is the same guy who once said that the circuit that makes him care what other people think is missing from his brain. 25% of tech jobs had just disappeared in the previous 2 years. It's the main reason why I'm now on YouTube making videos. Tech companies were citing AI as justification for mass layoffs, and many more layoffs are about to come. It's not going to stop. And the CEO of the company driving most of that posted a thank you note to the people losing their jobs. The kicker is that Sam Alman dropped out of a computer science degree, can't even write code, and confused basic AI terminology and engineering meetings for years. So, the person congratulating coders isn't even one of them. He's just the one turning their work into a product.
Elon Musk wants revenge. He thinks Sam Alman lied to him. He said Alman's nonprofit mission and the pitch about saving humanity was a total setup. And now he's in court trying to prove it. Elon Musk's lawyers asked to have CEO Sam Alman and president of that company Greg Brockman removed from their roles at Open AI as a legal remedy. They now asked to strip those executives of what they call authority and personal financial benefits they extracted from OpenAI's illicit for-profit operations and conversion. the backdrop here. Kelly Musk sued OpenAI, which he also co-founded, alleging that he was manipulated and deceived after OpenAI explored converting to a for-profit. Jury selection for that trial kicks off in a few weeks here in San Francisco. And Musk is now seeking more than $100 billion in damages from OpenAI.
By 2026, Musk had sued OpenAI twice. He tried to spite by the company and was now sitting in a federal courthouse watching lawyers argue over the soul of something he helped fund with $38 million of his own money. His lawyers call it hot air philanthropy, the hook for Alman's long con. The New Yorker asks, "Can Sam Alman be trusted?" Elon says no, and he's got receipts, emails, texts, private notes, and conversations that probably should have never happened in writing. Sam Alman though isn't backing down.
"I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there's been a lot of tactics, you know, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff. Now, this"
"Do you think Musk's approach then is from a position of insecurity about XAI?"
"Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy. I feel for him? I do actually. I don't think he's like a happy person. I do feel for him."
The problem though for Elon is that his entire case hinges on something that was implied. There were no contracts or signatures. The judge already seeing through a lot of this saying, "I have billionaires versus billionaires here." Yeah, pretty much. So, when asked how much real estate Elon occupies in Sam's head, Altman tries to play it cool.
"You know, I don't think about him that much."
"What What do you think of the larger idea though that that he's effectively saying that OpenAI long term will eat Microsoft alive?"
"I don't even know what that means. Do you know what that means? I'm not sure what he means except to say that he he thinks in the in the grand scheme of the partnership that ultimately you'll have uh more power and more influence and and more leverage over them than they'll have over you."
"I thought he was most I mean I someone was I thought he was just like tweeting all day about how much like OpenAI sucks and our model is bad and you know not going to be a good company and all of that."
Open AAI is lining up for an IPO with valuations pushing past $800 billion. So this fight lands at the worst possible moment for Altman. Former OpenAI researchers who don't trust Altman or the direction he took the company. They admit that they don't trust Elon either, but they do think some good can come from it. More scrutiny on what was promised versus what got built. Whether Elon personally benefits is almost besides the point. The jury is still out at the time of this video, but Sam Alman's track record isn't. A lot of people compare AI to the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer built the most destructive technology of his era and it almost destroyed him. He spent the rest of his life trying to warn people about it. Sam Alman is not Oppenheimer. He's not a scientist or an engineer. He's a guy who walked into a pitch meeting at 19, inflated his user numbers, got a bag of money, then turned a nonprofit into a forprofit, knows the damage his technology can cause, but still raises money for it.
In 2023, the Open AI board fired Sam Alman. They said they couldn't trust him. In 2026, The New Yorker asked if we could trust him. 4 days after that investigation was published, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's San Francisco home at 4 in the morning. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. The suspect fled to Open AI's headquarters and threatened to burn that down, too. That's how high the stakes around AI have gotten. High enough that Almond built an underground bunker, by the way, because every time the stakes go up, he's already somewhere else. Far enough away from the fallout, but just close enough to control what happens next. So if and when something breaks, it doesn't land on him. Sam Alman has never lost because he's never been the one holding the bag.