# Divine Right LLMS index: [llms.txt](/en/llms.txt) --- Everyone else had arrived, but Elon Musk was late as usual. It was the summer of 2015, and a group of men had gathered for a private dinner at Sam Altman’s invitation to discuss the future of AI and humanity. Musk had met Altman, fourteen years his junior, a while earlier and had formed a good impression. President of the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, Altman’s reputation preceded him. After starting his first company at age nineteen, he had rapidly established himself within Silicon Valley as a brilliant strategist and dealmaker with grand ambitions, even for the land of big-thinking founders. Musk found him to be smart, driven, and, most important, someone who espoused like-minded views on the need to carefully develop and govern artificial intelligence. It was as if, Musk would describe in a lawsuit years later, Altman had mirrored everything Musk had ever said about the subject to win his trust. For Altman’s part, he often said that Musk had been a childhood hero. After the older entrepreneur had shown him around the sprawling SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, that admiration had only deepened. “The thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars,” Altman wrote later of the experience. “I left thinking ‘huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like.’ ” Musk had been deeply concerned about AI for some time. In 2012, he’d met Demis Hassabis, the professorial CEO of the London-based AI lab DeepMind Technologies. Shortly thereafter, Hassabis had also paid Musk a visit at his SpaceX factory. As the two men sat in the canteen, surrounded by the sounds of massive rocket parts being transported and assembled, Hassabis raised the possibility that more advanced AI, of the kind that might one day exceed human intelligence, could pose a threat to humanity. What’s more, Musk’s fail-safe of colonizing Mars to escape would not work in this scenario. Superintelligence, Hassabis said with amusement, would simply follow humans into the galaxy. Musk, decidedly less amused, invested $5 million in DeepMind to keep tabs on the company. Later, at his 2013 birthday party in the lush wine-growing landscapes of Napa Valley, Musk had gotten into a heated and emotional debate with his longtime friend and Google cofounder Larry Page over whether AI surpassing human intelligence was in fact a problem. Page didn’t think so, calling it the next stage of evolution. When Musk balked, Page accused him of being a “specist,” discriminating against nonhuman species. After that, Musk began to speak incessantly about the existential risk of AI. At an MIT symposium, he described AI as probably the “biggest existential threat” to humanity and its development as “summoning the demon.” He met with publishers in New York, gripped by the thought of writing his own book about extinction-level threats, including AI. Later, at a recurring AI Salon event at Stanford, a young researcher named Timnit Gebru would come up to him after a talk and ask him why he was so obsessed with AI when the threat of climate change was more clearly existential. “Climate change is bad, but it’s not going to kill everyone,” he said. “AI could render humanity extinct.” In late 2013, when Musk learned that Google would acquire DeepMind, he was convinced that such a union would end very badly. Publicly, he warned that if Google gave a hypothetical AGI an objective to maximize profits, the software could seek to take out the company’s competitors at any cost. “Murdering all competing A.I. researchers as its first move strikes me as a bit of a character flaw,” Musk told The New Yorker. Over an hour-long Skype call in a closet upstairs at a house party in Los Angeles, he urged Hassabis to reconsider the deal. “The future of AI,” said Musk, “should not be controlled by Larry.” But although Musk didn’t know it, Google had already dispatched a team of AI researchers via private jet to DeepMind’s offices to vet the acquisition. As part of the evaluation, Jeff Dean, one of the earliest and most senior Googlers, had reviewed a sample of the company’s codebase personally and given the deal his approval. In January 2014, Google confirmed the acquisition. It had reportedly gone through for between $400 million and $650 million. Musk began hosting his own dinners to discuss ways of countering Google. In early 2015, he also met with US president Barack Obama to explain the dangers of AI, how to make it safer, and how to regulate it. Around the same time, Musk would see Hassabis again at SpaceX, this time for the first meeting of the Google DeepMind AI Ethics Board, a governance structure that Page and Hassabis had proposed to help oversee the responsible development of DeepMind’s technologies. The meeting convinced Musk that the board was a fraud and inflamed his concerns into an all-consuming obsession to counter Hassabis’s vision. For years afterward, Musk would regularly characterize Hassabis as a supervillain who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind’s evil. In the summer of 2016, not long after OpenAI was founded, several employees met Hassabis and reported back to the office: DeepMind did intend to take over the world; Musk’s characterization seemed correct. The following year, Musk hosted an off-site meeting for OpenAI employees at his SpaceX factory and launched into a rant about Hassabis. Before founding DeepMind, Hassabis had spent seven years running a video game design studio he’d founded. “He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world,” Musk shouted, referring to Hassabis’s 2004 title Evil Genius, “and fucking people don’t see it. Fucking people don’t see it! And Larry? Larry thinks he controls Demis but he’s too busy fucking windsurfing to realize that Demis is gathering all the power.” Musk’s paranoia about Hassabis would become a source of entertainment for DeepMind employees. Hassabis was incredibly ambitious and could be intense, certainly, but he was also kind and measured. “The creation of OpenAI felt like this semi-hysterical reaction to a fairly mild-mannered man,” recalls a former DeepMind researcher. “It seemed a little absurd.” --- On Musk’s list of recommended books was Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, in which Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that if AI ever became smarter than humans, it would be difficult to control and could cause an existential catastrophe. Given a simple objective like producing paper clips, this superior AI could determine that humans pose a threat to its paper clip–producing objective because they take up paper clip–producing resources. Bostrom then proposed a solution: It could be possible to avert the superintelligence control problem by “aligning” AI with human values—giving it the ability to extrapolate beyond explicit instructions to achieve its objectives without harming humans. This idea formed the basis of the AI alignment research discipline, which OpenAI would come to champion. To his far-reaching Twitter following, Musk called the book “worth reading.” In January 2023, the resurfacing of an email Bostrom wrote to a LISTSERV in the midnineties would make people question his own human values. “I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking,” he had written. “Take for example the following sentence: Blacks are more stupid than whites. I like that sentence and think it is true.” Bostrom would apologize, calling the email “disgusting” and an inaccurate representation of his views. To Musk, Altman seemed like a fellow traveler, someone who harbored his own streak for hedging against catastrophe. In 2016, Altman would tell longtime California chronicler Tad Friend at The New Yorker that in the event of a doomsday scenario, he planned to escape to New Zealand with his close friend and mentor, billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Thiel would describe Altman in the same article as “culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong.” Two years later Altman would tell Bloomberg that he had been joking but still had a go bag at the ready. He was particularly concerned about novel biological viruses and had packed gas masks alongside antibiotics, water, batteries, a tent, and a gun. But on his blog in February 2015, he agreed with Musk that superintelligence was “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” Even though a devastating engineered virus was more likely to happen, he said, it was “unlikely to destroy every human in the universe.” “Incidentally,” he wrote in a parenthetical, “Nick Bostrom’s excellent book ‘Superintelligence’ is the best thing I’ve seen on this topic. It is well worth a read.” A few months later, in May 2015, Altman emailed Musk. “Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI,” Altman wrote. “I think the answer is almost definitely not. If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.” He proposed for Y Combinator, or YC as it was known, to start a “Manhattan Project for AI,” structured “so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit.” “Obviously we’d comply with/aggressively support all regulation,” he added, nodding to Musk’s recent pushes for government oversight. “Probably worth a conversation,” Musk replied. In June, Altman emailed again with more details. “The mission would be to create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment—ie, the distributed version of the future that seems the safest. More generally, safety should be a first-class requirement.” He then proposed a governance structure that would defer to him and Musk. The two of them would sit on the board and invite three others to join them. “The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’ and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide,” Altman said. If Musk could also commit to meeting the team around once a month, Altman continued, it would help with “getting the best people to be part of it.” If Musk didn’t have time, his public endorsement “would still probably be really helpful for recruiting.” “Agree on all,” Musk responded. Altman proceeded to invite Musk to the private dinner on the future of AI and humanity to meet a group of top engineers and AI researchers that he hoped to get on board the project. With Musk’s confirmation of attendance, the dinner venue upgraded to a restaurant at one of the SpaceX founder’s go-to spots: the upscale sixteen-acre, $1,000-a-night Rosewood Hotel, nestled between dozens of venture-capital firms along the picturesque, tree-lined Sand Hill Road, which slices through Silicon Valley. The private dining room they gathered in opened to a balcony that overlooked a beautiful pool rimmed with Italian cypress trees and garden roses. As Musk walked in over an hour late, the rest of the men were eagerly waiting. Among them: Altman, Greg Brockman, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. The group would soon become the key leaders of the nonprofit. To capture the spirit of their shared mission, Musk would name it OpenAI. Over time, nearly all of the men would depart the organization after clashing with Altman and his vision of artificial intelligence. Once Altman and Musk were no longer on speaking terms, and Altman had replaced Musk as the new Silicon Valley “it guy,” Altman would change the public record on his beliefs about the dangers of what he was building. “I am now very much in the AI-will-be-a-tool camp,” he told Business Insider in 2023, “though I do think future humans and human society will be extremely different and we have a chance to be thoughtful about how to design that future.” Musk would come to feel like Altman had used him to catapult to prominence. It was an echo of an observation that has followed Altman throughout his life. “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king,” his mentor, Paul Graham, once famously said. Graham reinforced the point again years later: “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.” --- Samuel Harris Gibstine Altman was born April 22, 1985, the first son of Jewish parents, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Connie Gibstine, is a doctor. Her father, Marvin Gibstine, had also been a doctor, a pediatrician who, as a US Army physician, was dispatched with his new wife to Germany after World War II. Connie received both medical and law degrees, defying the gender norms of her generation. She specialized in dermatology, a profession with a stable paycheck and flexible hours, allowing her to come home to cook dinner and be there for her children. It was during law school at Loyola University Chicago that Connie met Jerold Altman, a handsome classmate three years her senior. Jerry, the son of a shoe manufacturer and businessman, had been married once before in his late twenties after attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and becoming a consultant in Boston. His former wife had retained her maiden name. When Connie married Jerry, she did as well. A few years later, they moved from Chicago back to their hometown of St. Louis. Jerry went into real estate and property management, for a time serving as chief counsel and vice president of the Roberts Companies, a St. Louis developer. Jerry was a people person. He had a passion for affordable housing and worked on several commercial and residential projects that sought to foster community and revitalize St. Louis. Sam would later repeat one of the biggest lessons his father taught him: “You always help people—even if you don’t think you have time, you figure it out.” Connie and Jerry had three boys in rapid succession: After Sam, there was Max, then Jack. Five years later—nine years after Sam—Connie gave birth to Annie, delighted to finally have a daughter. Connie referred to herself as an atheist but culturally Jewish; Jerry was more religious. He attended services during Jewish high holidays like Passover and insisted on all four children having bat and bar mitzvahs, Jewish coming-of-age ceremonies. Connie’s rationality and discipline and Jerry’s spirituality and focus on service would each manifest in their children in various ways. --- From a young age, Sam was driven and intensely curious. At two, he learned how to operate the family VCR; by three, he was fixing it. When his parents gifted him a Mac computer five years later, he quickly learned how to program and disassemble it. He settled well into the role of oldest brother, at times bossing around his younger siblings, at times playing their caretaker. He was extremely competitive, always insistent on winning board games. As much as Sam was a sore loser, he also had a zest for victory. When his grandmother gifted each of her grandchildren some stock, he picked Apple; Jack picked Applebee’s. It became a running joke in the family. Over twenty years, Jack’s stock barely grew; Sam’s shot up. “Your Apple has gone up—I don’t even want to think about it,” Jack later said, recounting the story, “hundreds and hundreds of times.” “Yes, it’s been a lot,” Sam said smugly. As Sam got older, Connie gave him a choice that she would give to all of her children: whether or not to transfer to a local private school, John Burroughs, known for its rigorous academics and impressive roster of famed alumni. Sam made the switch, Max switched but didn’t stay, Jack declined, and Annie followed her oldest brother. At Burroughs, Sam thrived. He excelled academically and socially with his extroverted personality and goofy humor. He was drawn not just to STEM but to writing and a variety of extracurriculars. He was head of the yearbook, captain of the water polo team, and did Model UN, a program that brings students together in events around the world to simulate the United Nations and debate public policy. “I remember thinking—and this is an embarrassing confession—‘I hope he doesn’t go into technology. He’s so creative and such a good writer,’ ” Andy Abbott, his English teacher who would become the head of Burroughs, would recall. “I hoped he would be an author or something like that.” Even then, Altman was charismatic and a natural leader. He loved to push the boundaries of what was politically acceptable at his more conservative school, once getting in trouble for leading his water polo team in a striptease down to their Speedos at an annual pep rally. It was during those years that he came out to his parents and classmates as gay. While it surprised his mother, she accepted it, as did the rest of the family. A group of Christian students at his school did not. On National Coming Out Day, they boycotted an assembly that he led about sexuality. Altman, seventeen, decided to confront them in a speech to the student body that his college counselor would credit for opening up the school’s culture. “Either you have tolerance to open community or you don’t, and you don’t get to pick and choose,” he later said, recalling his last line. Behind the confident facade, Sam was also sensitive. He worried about what people thought of him. He often grappled with anxiety, a trait that would carry over into his adult life. As his star rose in Silicon Valley, he’d sometimes call his mom with a headache, having convinced himself that he actually had meningitis or lymphoma. He would grow so panicked once while negotiating a deal that he’d have to lie down on the ground, bare chested, arms splayed, to calm himself. It was these two parts of him—his ambition and his sensitivity—that would come to mark the shape of his career. After spending many hours with Altman to profile him in 2016, The New Yorker’s Tad Friend would note this duality: On any given issue, Altman seemed as driven by a relentless desire to push ahead as he was attuned to the countervailing need for caution. Reach AGI as fast as possible; also: Don’t destroy humanity. --- Upon graduating from Burroughs in 2003, Altman left the Midwest for Stanford University, drawn in by its proximity to the tech industry. He didn’t settle on getting into tech immediately, however. As his teacher Andy Abbott had hoped, he did in fact consider being a writer. He also ever so briefly entertained the idea of being an investment banker. In the end, he leaned into his fascination with programming and computers. “I realized that the world does not need or value the seven-millionth novel,” he later said. “That was not where I could make the best contribution, and, in cases like that, it also is generally harder to make a lot of money or even enough money.” Altman majored in computer science and took a particular interest in AI and security. He dug deep into assignments, once disemboweling a piece of software he was supposed to use for his homework to its low-level code, a classmate remembered, and finding a bug in the assignment itself. As a sophomore, he became interested in mobile technology. After learning that phones would soon all be equipped with GPS, he went to a campus entrepreneur event and stepped onstage holding a flip phone. He made an open call for people to join him in building something that took advantage of the location-tracking feature. Around that time, he met Paul Graham, an entrepreneur and influential tech blogger who was beginning a new startup incubator called Y Combinator with his girlfriend Jessica Livingston. Altman joined YC’s first batch of companies in 2005 as the founder of his new startup, Loopt, and spent the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the incubator initially started. Loopt was a social network that used location tracking to notify users when they were close to friends or to recommend nearby restaurants. He worked so hard that summer and ate so much instant ramen, he gave himself scurvy. He didn’t regret it. “Work really hard in the beginning of your career,” he would later say to young founders. “It pays off like compound interest.” Altman never returned to Stanford. By late 2005, he and his cofounders were already in talks with VC firms New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia to give them $5 million in funding. Altman took his chances and dropped out of college. --- Loopt wouldn’t become a great success. After a seven-year run, Altman would sell it in 2012 for $43.4 million, around what his investors put in. But if you had listened to his interviews and his backers at the time, his startup would have sounded like it was on the precipice of ushering in a great transformation. It’s easier to understand the seeds of Altman’s success in those early interviews, when he’s selling you something far less alluring than artificial intelligence: namely, an earlier competitor to Foursquare, and one that didn’t work out. Both his media savvy and dealmaking, two pillars of his rise, rest on his remarkable ability to tell a good story. In this Altman is a natural. Even knowing as you watch him that his company would ultimately fail, you can’t help but be compelled by what he’s saying. He speaks with a casual ease about the singular positioning of his company. His startup is part of the grand, unstoppable trajectory of technology. Consumers and advertisers are clamoring for the service. Don’t bet against him—his success is inevitable. “The response has been tremendous,” he said to tech blogger Robert Scoble in June 2010 about his company’s new app, Loopt Star, for advertisers to push deals, such as coupons for restaurants or group discounts for retailers, to users based on their location. “We’ve crossed over this point where now the value perceived of sharing my location outweighs the privacy concerns of doing so,” he added. “In another few years, it’ll be the norm to share your location and it’ll be weird when you don’t.” “It’s a ridiculous distinction,” Altman said a few months later to CNN Business, about the difference between life online and in person; the two were fusing together with location tracking on mobile devices. “The whole world is going mobile and the whole world is going universal access to your data and your services no matter where you are,” he said. For Altman, even discussing the pitfalls was an opportunity to underscore the pitch. When The Information founder Jessica Lessin, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, told Altman in 2008 she would write a story about the privacy concerns of location tracking, he offered to help. He sent her a long list of risks that Loopt had already identified and its proposals for how to solve them. The implicit message: This is how the world will work, so you might as well prepare for it. “He didn’t just want to build a startup,” Lessin wrote about the experience. “He wanted to write the rules.” With Loopt, Altman built the networks and sharpened the skills that would become his greatest assets. As a startup founder through the mid aughts and early teens in the Bay Area, he placed himself in the thick of an era of rapid growth and buzzy new ventures. He regularly rubbed shoulders with other restless entrepreneurs, making crucial connections wherever he turned. Right as Loopt was getting started, its office was down the hall from the fledgling startup YouTube. Among Altman’s YC batchmates—the term for fellow founders in a YC cohort—were Steve Huffman and Chris Slowe, the respective cofounder and founding engineer of Reddit. Altman would become a Reddit board member in 2014, eventually amassing a larger share of the company than Huffman. Another YC batchmate was Emmett Shear, the cofounder of Twitch, who would step in as OpenAI’s interim CEO during Altman’s ouster almost two decades later. Altman also learned the best way to package things to the media and the surest way to strike extraordinary deals. Even as the CEO of a little-known startup, he successfully negotiated enterprise partnerships with the major US mobile phone carriers. Key to his formula, people say, is the combination of his remarkable listening skills, his willingness to help, and his ability to frame whatever he has to offer in terms of exactly what you want. (These days, as an ultrawealthy Silicon Valley linchpin, it doesn’t hurt that he can offer a lot.) He is the “Michael Jordan of listening,” people have said. He is the “Usain Bolt of fundraising,” says Geoff Ralston, who took over running YC after Altman. “Fundamentally when you raise money from someone, what you’re doing is telling a story about the future of whatever your project is, which involves that project, that company becoming an extraordinary success,” Ralston says. “Sam can tell a tale that you want to be part of, that is compelling, and that seems real, that seems even likely.” Ralston likens it to Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field. “Steve could tell a story that overwhelmed any other part of your reality,” he says, “whether there was a distortion of reality or it became a reality. Because remember, the thing about Steve is he actually built stuff that did change your reality. It wasn’t just distortion. It was real. “And obviously, Sam has too.” But there’s a flip side to the story. “Sam remembers all these details about you. He’s so attentive. But then part of it is he uses that to figure out how to influence you in different ways,” says one person who worked several years with him. “He’s so good at adjusting to what you say, and you really feel like you’re making progress with him. And then you realize over time that you’re actually just running in place.” Twice during his time running Loopt, senior leaders at the startup approached its board and urged it to fire Altman, according to The Wall Street Journal, leveling two accusations that would follow him all the way through to his brief ouster at OpenAI. One was his tendency to operate for his own gain rather than the company’s, and at times even at the expense of the company. The other was his seeming compulsion to distort the truth. The latter was harder to pin down: He sometimes lied about details so insignificant that it was hard to say why the dishonesty mattered at all. But over time, those tiny “paper cuts,” as one person called them, led to an atmosphere of pervasive distrust and chaos at the company. In a manner that would come to define the rest of his career, Altman emerged from the crisis with the upper hand. Loopt’s board sided with Altman. Despite its middling record, Altman would also emerge from Loopt much better off than he’d started. He used the startup to springboard himself higher and higher into the most powerful networks in Silicon Valley and subsequently used those connections to orchestrate an exit for his company that made himself rich. At twenty-six, he netted $5 million from Loopt’s sale. Altman considered this a disappointment—Jobs had been worth $256 million by age twenty-five— but he would soon accumulate far more money. That wealth would slowly change his lifestyle. Eventually, he’d stop going to the grocery store. He’d travel by private jet. He’d collect luxury sports cars, including McLarens and an ultrarare $5 million Koenigsegg, and cultivate a love for racing them. For a time he attended the annual weeklong psychedelic and sex-fueled desert art festival Burning Man. He became, like many Silicon Valley bigwigs, a casual user of ketamine, a party drug that can be legally prescribed to relieve depression. With his success, Altman brought his brothers along with him. In 2012, he started a personal investment fund called Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack, who had studied economics at Princeton and was trying his hand at investment banking. Jack subsequently switched to tech and founded a startup, Lattice, that would get funded by YC after Sam became the incubator’s president. Max, who had studied computer science at Duke and worked briefly at Microsoft before becoming a trader, switched to working at another YC company, Zenefits, in 2014. Two years later, he would join Sam and Jack at Hydrazine Capital. During that time, both younger brothers moved in with Sam for what was meant to be a temporary arrangement. The three ended up living together—a tight knot of brotherly love and business relationships—for many years to come. --- Of particular importance to the shape of Altman’s career was his relationship with his two biggest mentors, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel. Known as PG, Graham had made his name first as the cofounder of a startup, Viaweb, which Yahoo acquired in 1998 for $49 million, and then as a blogger who published popular essays on startups, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. After starting YC, he impressed his views onto each generation of YC founders. Every YC company that succeeded gained the incubator, and Graham, increasing prestige. By the time Altman sold Loopt, the incubator had already seeded several startups that had grown or would soon grow into billion-dollar companies, including Dropbox and Airbnb. YC became the most elite club in the Valley. If you were in, you gained instant cachet and access to more resources, including a built-in customer base among old YC companies, investors more eager to fund you, and higher valuations. If you were out, no such luck. Graham became an essential tastemaker for startups and startup culture in Silicon Valley. “Many folks in the space, in the ecosystem, came to live by and to take his fundamental precepts for what it meant to be a good founder and a successful entrepreneur,” says Ralston. “Many of us looked to PG for guidance on a lot of things.” Graham also became a lightning rod for criticism. He championed the idea of the tech industry as a meritocracy, while designing YC to be an insular fraternity. He defended YC for not having many female founders by saying that most women had not been prepared from an early age to succeed as tech entrepreneurs. After analyzing the performance of applicants in YC interviews, he identified thirty or forty factors, including “a strong foreign accent,” that were predictors of failure when candidates exhibited several of them together. This was not a flaw of YC’s evaluation system but rather an important data-driven signal, he said. Graham’s support for Altman was strong and early. In a 2006 blog post, Graham recounted meeting Altman as a college sophomore. “Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we’ve funded so far,” Graham wrote. “But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.’ ” Altman quickly inspired Graham to search for more Altmans. He asked the young founder what YC should ask on its application to discover more people like him. Altman suggested adding a question that Graham would soon describe as one of the most important: “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.” It would come to encapsulate and encourage a certain ethos among generations of startups to bend, bypass, and break the rules to domination. By the time Altman was twenty-three, Graham was comparing him to Jobs. “Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I’m advising startups,” he wrote. “On questions of design, I ask, ‘What would Steve do?’ But on questions of strategy or ambition I ask ‘What would Sama do?’ ”—referring to Altman by his nickname, which is also his X handle. It was Graham’s singular belief in Altman that would catapult him to the YC presidency in 2014 at age twenty-eight, two years after selling Loopt. When Graham asked in his kitchen if Altman wanted to be his successor, Altman smiled uncontrollably. “YC somewhat gets to direct the course of technology,” Altman would later say. “I think his goal is to make the whole future,” Graham said of Altman. The succession story would get repeated so often that it would turn into Silicon Valley lore. “If Sam smiles, it’s super deliberate,” a former YC founder says. “Sam has smiled uncontrollably only once, when PG told him to take over YC.” Graham’s choice surprised many others, but he held strong convictions. “There wasn’t a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top,” Livingston would recall. “It was just: Sam.” Peter Thiel became Altman’s second mentor. Another linchpin in the tech industry, Thiel became a billionaire by founding payments company PayPal and data-mining firm Palantir, and being an early investor in Facebook. Like Graham, Thiel would attract his own fair share of controversies, including being a rare vocal Trump backer among his tech peers during the 2016 election and secretly funding a lawsuit that would lead to the demise of Gawker Media, in retaliation for the site outing him as gay nearly a decade earlier. After the sale of Loopt, Altman suffered a breakup with one of his cofounders as well as boyfriend of nine years. Heartbroken and professionally adrift, Altman took a year off, started Hydrazine, and raised $21 million. Thiel, almost twenty years Altman’s senior, pitched in a majority of the funding. When Altman became a YC partner, he used Hydrazine to bet on the accelerator’s portfolio companies while also helping Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, to identify high-return investments. Thiel’s net worth multiplied several times over. The two men grew extremely close. (Their bond was once described as having only one parallel: Thiel’s mentor relationship with Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.) Graham and Thiel heavily influenced Altman’s worldview, his approach to building effective businesses, and his savvy as a political operator. The two mentors impressed on Altman the imperative for scale and the efficiencies of capitalism over government. “The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was ‘increasing your sales will fix all problems,’ ” Altman wrote in a 2013 blog post titled “Growth and Government” that thanked Graham and Thiel for shaping his ideas. “This turns out to be another way of phrasing Paul Graham’s point that growth is critical.” For startups, more sales meant more capital meant better talent and fewer internal tensions. For countries, more growth meant more technological innovation meant a higher quality of life. The dysfunction in the US government was threatening this growth cycle, Altman added. “Either you’re growing, or you’re slowly dying,” and the US government was dying. “Without economic growth, democracy doesn’t work because voters occupy a zero-sum system,” he said. This idea would evolve into a core thesis driving Altman’s career and investments. “The thing that people in the private sector can do the most to help get the country back on track is to get economic growth back,” he’d say in 2017. “In the US we had two hundred years of unrivaled economic growth. We had one hundred years of territorial expansion; we had one hundred years of new technology really working,” he added, glossing over a bloody colonial history and the complicated labor and environmental record of unfettered industrialization. “And people were mostly pretty happy. And now we don’t.” “Sustainable economic growth is almost always a moral good,” he’d add in 2019. “Part of what motivates me to work on Y Combinator and OpenAI is getting back to that, getting back to sustainable economic growth, getting back to a world where most people’s lives get better every year and that we feel the shared spirit of success.” On building companies, Altman frequently channeled Thiel’s “monopoly” strategy, the belief that all founders should “aim for monopoly” to create a successful business. In 2014, Altman returned to his alma mater, Stanford, to teach a class called How to Start a Startup. He invited Thiel to expand upon his signature philosophy in a lecture called “Competition Is for Losers.” Monopolies are good, Thiel said, because “they are much more stable, longer-term businesses, you have more capital, and…it’s symptomatic of having created something really valuable.” Building one relied on having some kind of proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and good branding. Each of these elements needed to endure over time. With proprietary technology, it was critical to stay in the leading position. “You don’t want to be superseded by somebody else,” Thiel said. “There are all these areas of innovation where there was tremendous innovation but no one made any money.” He gave the example of disc drive manufacturing in the 1980s, which saw repeated advancements every two years, but by different companies. “It had great benefit to consumers, but it didn’t actually help the people who started these companies,” he said. Companies needed not only to have “a huge breakthrough” at the beginning to establish their dominance but also to ensure they had the “last breakthrough” to maintain it, such as by “improving on it at a quick enough pace that no one can ever catch up. “If you have a structure of the future where there’s a lot of innovation and other people will come up with new things in the thing you’re working on,” he concluded, “that’s great for society. It’s actually not that good for your business.” --- From both men, Altman also learned the importance of building relationships and creating “network effects” as an individual. “I’ve heard a lot of different theories about how things get done,” he wrote on his blog in 2013. “Here’s the best one: a combination of focus and personal connections. Charlie Rose said this to Paul Graham, who told it to me.” Altman would later add a third ingredient: self-belief. “For startups I think it’s really important to add this,” he said. “You actually have to believe you might do it.” Altman began to live by this mantra religiously. He cultivated relationships with intensity and discipline, first by giving his time and tactical advice and then, as he came to control increasing amounts of capital, his money. Thiel was a role model in this regard: His mentor had long used advice and money to build his network, and used his network to amass more connections and money. To young entrepreneurs and other people he wanted to bring into his orbit, Thiel provided mentorship and small amounts of capital, as well as access to that orbit. In much the same way, Altman learned to use his financial and social resources strategically. As his stature and wealth grew, he scaled the approach with relentless efficiency. He became a frequent host of dinners and gatherings at his house for different, interlocking groups of people—people connected to YC or his companies, people who share his interests in investing, the active and growing gay entrepreneur community. He imparted advice through concise texts and calls —as short as two minutes—to pack more into his schedule. He connected people to one another over email with a single word (“meet”) or a single punctuation mark (“?”)—a famous habit of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—to get a conversation started. With his money, Altman made very few large bets, going mostly instead for small ones at high volume. Over time he accumulated financial ties with more than four hundred companies through YC, Hydrazine, and his other funds, according to a June 2024 Wall Street Journal assessment. It’s hard to find people within Altman’s inner circle who don’t have some kind of financial relationship with him. His second-ever and most successful startup investment was in the YC-backed payments technology company Stripe, for which Greg Brockman was its first chief technology officer. Altman invested early in YC-backed Airbnb, the cofounder and CEO of which, Brian Chesky, is one of his closest confidants. He pitched into his ex-boyfriend and friend Matt Krisiloff’s biotechnology firm Conception. He coinvests in deals with another ex-boyfriend, Lachy Groom, a prominent solo venture capitalist. To those people, it’s a testament to Altman’s generosity. He regularly offers his resources, whether opening up his houses for people to stay in or supporting them financially. He has gone out of his way to support even complete strangers, once sending funds to a man in Ethiopia who emailed him seeking his help to buy a laptop, one person recalls. During the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank crisis, when a run on a critical financial institution for Valley startups led to the largest bank failure since 2008, he sent money without any paperwork to companies to save them from shutting down or laying off people, remembers Krisiloff. “It’s an extremely rare trait,” Groom says, “and that trait has really rubbed off on me— the generosity. I feel very grateful for that.” Altman developed the same approach with politicians, taking another page out of Thiel’s book. But where Thiel asserted his wealth to back Republican candidates, pumping tens of millions into their campaigns, Altman grew increasingly involved in politics in the opposite direction, hosting fundraisers and writing checks for Democrats. For a time, the political differences between Thiel and Altman strained their relationship. In 2017, Altman leaned into their disagreements and went on a tour of America, much like Thiel’s other mentee Zuckerberg, and spoke to one hundred Trump supporters. Altman also entertained the idea of going into politics himself with a run for California governor, reasoning that it would place him in charge of the world’s fifth largest economy, a strong stepping stone for fixing what he saw as dysfunction in the political system. He published a manifesto called “The United Slate,” with three principles: (1) prosperity from technology; (2) economic fairness; and (3) personal liberty. He organized focus groups to test out his candidacy. People close to him joked that he should shoot for US president. In the end, Altman never became a politician—the focus groups thought he came off as too young—but he began to act like one. In his first few years of running YC, he still had boyish cheeks, owned one suit jacket, and sat with a leg popped up or perched like a bird atop his chair. He sometimes spoke flippantly and in casual hyperboles, punctuating his sentences with profanity. He was breezier with his references to provocative personal details, like his collection of guns. He was faster to anger and to show his impatience for ineffective people, at one point coding up a software program to size up YC founders based on their email response times. A few years in, he had refined his appearance and ironed out the edges. He’d traded in T-shirts and cargo shorts for fitted Henleys and jeans. He’d built eighteen pounds of muscle in a single year to flesh out his small frame. He learned to talk less, ask more questions, and project a thoughtful modesty with furrowed brow. In private settings and with close friends, he still showed flashes of anger and frustration. In public ones and with acquaintances, he embodied the nice guy. He readily gave people credit for things and texted in all lowercase with lots of smiley and frowny faces. He gave employees his personal number, encouraging them to reach out at any time and responding to their feedback with impressive attentiveness. He avoided expressing negative emotions, avoided confrontation, avoided saying no to people. Once when OpenAI fired an employee, he reached out personally to offer ketamine and booze as consolation. “I think all of Sam’s relationships end in a good way whether you want it to or not,” the employee says. Altman became his own institution. YC was his platform and accelerant. He converted its power into his own power, its network into his own network. Those personal connections and his public reputation became his greatest currency. He met regularly with policymakers, who viewed him as a gateway to Silicon Valley. In 2016, it was Ashton Carter, Obama’s secretary of defense, who sought Altman’s advice on how his agency could tap into the well of young tech talent. Three years later, on the day Altman stepped down from YC in March 2019, it was Chuck Schumer. At the time the US Senate minority leader, Schumer paid a clandestine visit to OpenAI with his Secret Service detail. “You’re doing important work,” Schumer told employees in the office as he sat side by side with Altman in armchairs in front of a TV projecting a roaring fire. “We don’t fully understand it, but it’s important,” Schumer added. “And I know Sam. You’re in good hands.” --- Altman’s ascendancy would also come at a mounting cost as he accumulated more and more detractors and outright enemies who would echo the accusations of his senior lieutenants at Loopt: that of his self-serving pursuit of power and his compulsive dishonesty. While many people who benefited from Altman’s advice, wealth, and networks became stalwart loyalists, others began to view him as devilishly capable of bending situations to his advantage. For some, including his partners at YC and other power brokers, this could be an annoyance. For employees and people with far less leverage, it could be a source of fear. To still others, who disagreed vehemently with his worldview, he was a massive threat. Altman’s climb would also, to his agony and then ire, unravel his relationship with his sister. As kids and well into his twenties, Sam and Annie were close. She, the youngest; he, the oldest, her protector. She was science minded and the artsy one, the most emotionally expressive. At times he liked to get her opinions about his romantic partners, to confide in her about his inner worries and emotions. But as he grew more ingrained in Silicon Valley, Annie watched him build thicker and thicker walls around the part of him that was the most sensitive. He would tell her about new psychological tactics he’d learned, she remembers, like using fewer words in an email, to appear more powerful as a business leader. At first it made her sad, and then scared, about whether that sensitive part was even still there. “I definitely still got glimpses of it for a while, which was why I stayed close,” she says. “And then I started being the one to be harmed by him.” When Sam first came into wealth, she says, his then boyfriend created a rule: for every big-ticket item that Sam purchased, he needed to donate the same amount to a good cause. For a time, it created a check on the rapid creep of Sam’s lifestyle. But as he earned money faster than he could spend it, she felt his relationship with that money grow more complicated. In her view, he began to hoard it as he grew more and more out of touch with people in need. Through the end of 2019 and the first half of 2020, several times he and the rest of the family declined or were reluctant to provide Annie access to what she saw as emergency financial support to help front her rent and medical expenses, according to extensive correspondence she shared with me. At the time, she faced acute physical and mental health challenges, her medical and therapy records show, exacerbated by the sudden death of their father. It left her struggling with unstable housing; out of desperation to make ends meet, she turned to sex work for money. In the summer of 2020, as OpenAI began to gain its first major wave of public attention under Sam’s leadership, Annie would cut off contact with her family. There is a case to be made that Sam, as well as his brothers, were following the lead of their and Annie’s mother in an attempt to push Annie toward financial independence. It’s a complicated and painful family story, difficult to judge based on partial information. In a public statement in January 2025, Sam, his mom, and his two brothers expressed their love and concern for Annie and denied all of her allegations as “utterly untrue.” In response to my requests for interviews and detailed asks for comment, Connie Gibstine provided a shorter version of a similar statement and declined further elaboration; Sam, via OpenAI’s communications team, and his brothers did not respond. Nevertheless, Annie’s experience contains striking parallels to the many themes explored within these pages: the ever-widening gulf between those who benefit and those left behind in the supposed march for progress; the loss of agency and voice among the disenfranchised confronted by that accelerating chasm; the limits of ceding so much power not just to companies but to the individuals who run them without the scaffolding to provide commensurate checks and balances. Annie’s actions would also make her story an inescapable part of understanding OpenAI’s trajectory and its impact on AI development: In 2021, she would make the decision to go public with serious allegations about Sam, claiming that he sexually abused her as a child—which her family has called “the worst” of her “untrue” accusations—and also that he and the rest of the family abandoned her when she was at her most vulnerable. She would subsequently file a lawsuit against Sam for such alleged abuse on January 6, 2025, two days before her thirty-first birthday, to meet the statute of limitations for such cases in Missouri. Annie’s persistent efforts to voice her allegations and tell her side of the story would affect Sam and influence OpenAI’s other executives as they contended with his and the company’s surge to global impact and prominence. Each of these puzzle pieces—Sam’s ascendence, his character and relationships, the divisiveness he left in his wake, the flows of money and power —speaks to the path that led to his sudden and fleeting ouster. For a brief moment, the rest of the world caught a glimpse into the struggles happening at the highest levels to dictate the future of artificial intelligence. It would reveal just how much the quest for dominance of that technology—already restructuring society and terraforming our earth—ultimately rests on the polarized values, clashing egos, and messy humanity of a small handful of fallible people.