Sam Altman actually desires to be appreciated. “That is his superpower,” says Keach Hagey. “He’s very good at doing favors for people—getting people to see his vision. But he’s bad at telling people no.”
That’s what the Wall Street Journal reporter has taken away from years of overlaying the tech innovator’s profession and the rise of ChatGPT. But it’s additionally the thread that runs via Atlman’s public life extra broadly, Hagey tells Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, together with government editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, on the newest episode of Inside the Hive. In it, Hagey, who’s popping out with a ebook on Altman subsequent month, titled The Optimist, goes deep on Altman’s progressive politics, his friendship with Peter Thiel, his feud with Elon Musk, and his dealings with Donald Trump, alongside along with his transient exit from OpenAI—a.ok.a. “The Blip”—and imaginative and prescient for this probably world-altering expertise.
The very first thing to find out about Altman is that he’s not a “nerd’s nerd,” as Calderone notes. “He could talk the talk of a tech nerd. But at the same time, he had this charm and this charisma…he could try to win over a room.” This, partially, is what scored Altman a partnership on the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, the place he met Thiel, who impressed him to take larger swings on hard-tech growth. In 2016, nonetheless, their friendship was examined when Thiel “became really the only person just about in all of tech to support Donald Trump,” recounts Hagey. Despite being ardently against Trump, Altman “stood up for Peter Thiel as his friend, but also in general as a philosophical point…that we’re not here to shut down people’s support for major party candidates,” she says.
Shortly after Trump’s first election win, Hagey notes, Altman’s radical self-belief led him to think about a proper entrance into politics. “He had conversations with private folks about running for governor of California and also about one day running for president,” Hagey says. “He figured there would be a millennial president, and why shouldn’t it be him? This speaks to his desire to just be in the room. This is what the OpenAI experience ultimately brought him.” (Altman informed Hagey within the ebook he didn’t wish to run for president.)
Incidentally, Altman was practically booted from the room in 2023, when the OpenAI founder was abruptly fired by the corporate’s board of administrators over a insecurity in his management. Although he was reinstated after inner pushback, Hagey discovered the episode revealing: “I learned about a bunch of moments where the board felt that Sam had misled them about safety stuff, about the speed of things, and how deep their distrust was of him.”
Of course, being appreciated is already proving important to staying afloat amid the second presidency of Trump, who governs by a loyalty-first method. So far, from the appears to be like of Trump’s $500 billion partnership with OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle, Altman has managed to get again within the president’s good graces. But given his yearslong feud with Musk, who’s additionally competing within the AI house, there’s no assure that Altman will handle to remain out of the crosshairs. As Jones notes, there could be a “bigger target on his back.”
