🌊 Is Sam Altman Playing Us?

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By Max Towey

In 2009, Inc. asked venture capitalist Paul Graham to name the five most influential founders of the last 30 years.

He began his list with Steve Jobs. Then he said Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. After that, the founder of Gmail. In the fifth spot, he gave a name nobody knew: Sam Altman.

Graham wrote, “Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask ‘What would Steve do?’ but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask ‘What would Sam do?’”

Paul Graham was the perfect person to answer this question. In 2005, Graham founded Y Combinator (YC), the startup accelerator that’s produced DoorDash, Airbnb, Reddit, Coinbase, Stripe, and over 100 other unicorns. That helped Graham become a billionaire and minted his status as a Silicon Valley legend. But why did he choose Sam?

“You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king,” Graham wrote in 2008 of Altman, then 23. He later said, “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.”

In 2009, Altman was building a social networking company called Loopt. He raised a total of $30M for Loopt before selling it for $43.4M in 2012 – a meager return for such a well-funded startup. Nevertheless, he wooed Graham into making him a partner at YC in 2011. Three years later, he was its president.

YC grew significantly under Altman. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said in 2016, “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.” But soon his mind was elsewhere, fixed on his nonprofit OpenAI – a nonprofit whose founding mission was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” In 2015, Altman wrote, “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

Nine years later, OpenAI is worth $300B – new reports suggest it’s exploring a sale for $500B – and Altman seems hellbent on developing the SMI he claimed might end the world. But his ambitions seem grander than that: The WSJ has reported that he tried to raise upwards of $5T to increase the world’s semiconductor chip capacity. He’s also invested heavily in nuclear fusion and serves as chairman of Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion company in which he personally invested $375M. He’s also exploring social experiments, like Worldcoin, an identity database linked to universal basic income.

So the question we have is this: Why is Altman appearing on so many podcasts?

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading. What are your takes on Sam Altman’s podcast appearances? Send in your thoughts here.

And thanks to those who wrote in yesterday about Trump’s takeover of American industry.

Jerry wrote:

And Sarah wrote:

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—Max and Max