In 2016, Sam Altman was more and more trying to politics as the world the place he may understand his hovering ambitions. That fall, his highschool ex, Nathan Watters, visited San Francisco, accompanying his new boyfriend to a job interview. Whereas Watters’s boyfriend was out, Watters and Altman had lunch at a restaurant close to Dolores Park, not removed from Altman’s $5 million Victorian. The subject turned to the upcoming basic presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Watters stated Altman advised him that if Clinton didn’t win, he was going to run for president: “‘If she doesn’t get it, and Trump does, I can’t have that once more. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna run. I believe I can win,’” Watters recalled him saying. “I’m positive he did assume he may win.” Altman disputes that he stated this, and says he by no means wished to run for president.
In early October, The New Yorker printed an 11,000-word profile of Altman which revealed the total scope of his ambition to a basic viewers for the primary time. “Like everybody in Silicon Valley, Altman professes to wish to save the world; in contrast to nearly everybody there, he has a plan to do it,” wrote Tad Good friend. The article handled his presidential ambitions as a joke—the form of factor his brothers, Max and Jack, would tease him about whereas the three of them made pasta. After they identified that in 2020 Sam could be thirty-five, simply sufficiently old to legally qualify, Altman shot again: “Let’s ship the Jewish homosexual man! That’ll work!”
Inside Y Combinator, the distinguished startup accelerator that Altman had been working for 2 years, the companions had been shocked by the New Yorker profile. “Sam advised all of the companions, ‘Hey, that is going to be about YC,’ and it finally ends up being about Sam. And everybody was like, ‘Look we don’t give a fuck, however like, why did you inform us this?’” one YC accomplice stated. They didn’t have lengthy for such carping, nonetheless. Days after it was printed, YC confronted an uproar over Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million contribution to Trump’s presidential marketing campaign. Thiel was a part-time YC accomplice, a largely honorific function, and his help for Trump was hardly a secret; he’d appeared on the Republican Nationwide Conference over the summer season, delivering a speech the place he’d declared that he was “proud to be homosexual.”
However, the extent of the help—particularly in mild of the leak on October 7, 2016, of an Entry Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about grabbing girls by the genitals—was greater than the largely liberal Silicon Valley may bear. Ten days later, Ellen Pao, the previous Reddit CEO who had gone on to co-found a nonprofit targeted on variety, stated that her group was chopping ties with YC over its affiliation with Thiel. “Due to his continued connection to YC, we’re compelled to interrupt off our relationship with YC,” she wrote. “Right now it’s clear to us that our values should not aligned.” Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment was extra pointed concerning the connections between YC, Thiel, and Trump. “That is actually paying an enormous sum of money to straight help a racist, sexist bigot with quickly mounting allegations of a number of sexual assaults,” he wrote.
Privately, Altman was additionally mystified why Thiel would help somebody like Trump. That they had a number of conversations about it. “I used to be not attempting to inform folks to not vote for Trump,” Altman stated. “I used to be actually attempting to know it.” However when the web started melting down over Thiel’s help, Altman stepped in with a forceful protection of each his pal and the precept of mental freedom. He disagreed with Thiel on this matter—in actual fact, he discovered Trump to be “an unacceptable risk to America” and “unfit to be president”—however tweeted, “YC just isn’t going to fireplace somebody for supporting a serious celebration nominee.”
When Trump received, Altman was devastated. He had tried to forestall it in the one approach he knew how—by funding and constructing a bit of software program, on this case a “Turbo Tax of voter registration” known as VotePlz. Now he turned as soon as once more to code, constructing an internet site known as Observe Trump to measure how President Trump’s actions throughout his first 100 days would measure up in opposition to his marketing campaign guarantees. And he used Fb to solicit introductions to at least one hundred Trump voters throughout the nation in order that he may ask them straight about their choice; he printed his findings on his weblog. One quote, in Altman’s view, received to the guts of the matter of what too many Democrats had failed to acknowledge: “You all can defeat Trump subsequent time, however not for those who preserve mocking us, refusing to take heed to us, and chopping us out.”
Trump’s upset victory had immediately turned Thiel into essentially the most highly effective political pressure in Silicon Valley, after he had stood largely alone earlier than a refrain of haters for his contrarian lengthy shot, and prevailed. (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, a member of Fb’s board, had gone as far as to attempt to push fellow member Thiel off it, arguing his help for Trump confirmed “catastrophically unhealthy judgement.”) Altman, for his half, had a call to make: Ought to he actually pursue the presidential run he had advised Watters about? Or ought to he run for one thing else? Ought to he run for workplace in any respect, or ought to he attempt to recruit others to do it in his stead?
Altman nonetheless wished to know Trump’s victory. A contact put him in contact with Charles Johnson, an alt-right blogger and political operative who had labored with Thiel to plot the destruction of the snarky weblog empire Gawker Media. Johnson had come up via conservative campus politics and brought a tour at Tucker Carlson’s Every day Caller earlier than beginning his personal outlet, GotNews. In 2014, after Rolling Stone ran a narrative about an alleged gang rape on the College of Virginia that it later retracted, Johnson printed the total identify of the alleged sufferer—in violation of journalistic norms—and a photograph of the fallacious lady, for which he later apologized. That drew the mocking consideration of Gawker, which known as Johnson “the Internet’s Worst Journalist” and made up a collection of untamed claims—“there isn’t a proof that Chuck Johnson was arrested in 2002 for pinning a sheep to a fence and fucking it”—meant as joking commentary on what Gawker implied was Johnson’s fast-and-loose, innuendo-laden model of journalism.
Johnson sued Gawker Media for defamation, which received the eye of a pal of Thiel’s who knew that the billionaire was within the midst of a virtually decade-long secret plot to take down the corporate after its tech-focused weblog Valleywag outed him in 2007. In line with Max Chafkin’s e-book about Thiel, The Contrarian, Johnson joined Thiel’s campaign, which in the end settled on secretly funding a lawsuit filed by Hulk Hogan for invasion of privateness after Gawker posted a surreptitiously taped video of him having intercourse together with his pal’s spouse. Gawker Media misplaced the case and filed for chapter in 2016. (To at the present time, few issues delight Thiel greater than recalling his dismantling of what he nonetheless calls “the Manhattan-based terrorist group.”)
