Sam Altman actually needs to be appreciated. “That’s his superpower,” says Keach Hagey. “He’s superb at doing favors for individuals—getting individuals to see his imaginative and prescient. However he’s dangerous at telling individuals no.”
That’s what the Wall Avenue Journal reporter has taken away from years of overlaying the tech innovator’s profession and the rise of ChatGPT. Nevertheless it’s additionally the thread that runs by Atlman’s public life extra broadly, Hagey tells Self-importance Truthful editor in chief Radhika Jones, together with government editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, on the most recent episode of Contained in 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 doubtlessly world-altering know-how.
The very first thing to find out about Altman is that he’s not a “nerd’s nerd,” as Calderone notes. “He might speak the speak of a tech nerd. However on the identical time, he had this appeal and this charisma…he might attempt 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 greater swings on hard-tech improvement. In 2016, nevertheless, their friendship was examined when Thiel “grew to become actually the one particular person nearly in all of tech to help Donald Trump,” recounts Hagey. Regardless of being ardently against Trump, Altman “stood up for Peter Thiel as his buddy, but additionally normally as a philosophical level…that we’re not right here to close down individuals’s help for main occasion candidates,” she says.
Shortly after Trump’s first election win, Hagey notes, Altman’s radical self-belief led him to contemplate a proper entrance into politics. “He had conversations with non-public people about operating for governor of California and likewise about sooner or later operating for president,” Hagey says. “He figured there could be a millennial president, and why shouldn’t or not it’s him? This speaks to his need to only be within the room. That is what the OpenAI expertise in the end introduced him.” (Altman informed Hagey within the ebook he didn’t need to run for president.)
By the way, 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. Though he was reinstated after inside pushback, Hagey discovered the episode revealing: “I discovered a few bunch of moments the place the board felt that Sam had misled them about security stuff, in regards to the velocity of issues, and the way deep their mistrust was of him.”
After all, being appreciated is already proving important to staying afloat amid the second presidency of Trump, who governs by a loyalty-first strategy. To this point, 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. However 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 “greater goal on his again.”
