OpenAI's CEO Is Not What He Seems
OpenAI has a lot more in common with Tesla than you might think.
Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s brilliant exposé on Sam Altman has gone bananas viral, and rightly so; it’s bloody brilliant. Go read it. Now, everyone is teaming up against Altman and calling out his long history of bullshit. But what I haven’t seen much of is an explanation as to why Altman has thrived in spite of everything. Or, should I say, why he has thrived because of everything. I think there are a variety of legitimate ways to answer that question. So, let me walk you through Altman’s actions, and I will let you come to your own conclusions about his true intentions. Then I will try to explain my opinion about the situation, as from my perspective, Altman is a lot more similar to another tech bro we all know and hate than you might think.
The Lies
Let’s start with why Farrow and Marantz’s piece went so viral. Ultimately, Altman is a serial liar and manipulator with a strong streak of sociopathy. While Farrow and Marantz’s piece was the first to make the wider public aware of this, we have known about his devastatingly loose connection to the truth for years.
The OpenAI Files prove this perfectly. It is a catalogue of sources detailing his deceitfulness going back decades. So, let me give you the major highlights in chronological order.
2010s: On two separate occasions, employees at Altman’s first venture, Loopt, attempted to oust him from his CEO position for recurrent “deceptive and chaotic” behaviour. Senior executives even threatened to leave if Altman wasn’t removed as CEO.
2019: Altman was forced out of his role as president of VC firm Y Combinator (YC). He was allegedly accused of prioritising his own personal enrichment at the cost of the company’s needs He spearheaded YC’s investment in OpenAI, which granted him the position of co-chairman of OpenAI. This moonlighting distracted him from his YC duties. He also ‘double-dipped’ by getting his own personal investment firm to back startups he helped YC invest in. All of these decisions were kept hiddenfrom leadership at YC, who fired him when they found out.
2019–2023: Altman repeatedly claimed he wasn’t fired but promoted to be a chairman of Y Combinator, despite never receiving such a promotion and never holding such a position. He even falsely listed himself as chairman on his SEC filing for years.
2021–2023: Altman hid his ownership of OpenAI’s Startup Fund from the board. The fund was set up in a way that would financially benefit Altman and it raised serious conflict of interest issues because it invested in companies in which Altman also had personal investments.
2023: OpenAI executives, Chief Technical Officer Mira Murati and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, lost confidence in Altman due to his long pattern of documented dishonesty and manipulation.
2023: Altman attempted to gain control over employee-board communications, which is vital for employees reporting issues at the company and holding Altman’s questionable conduct to account.
2023: According to former members of the OpenAI board, Altman fabricated claims about certain board members’ views, possibly in an attempt to pit them against each other.
2023: While being reinstated as OpenAI CEO just days after being ousted for rampant lying and manipulation, Altman used his leverage to restructure OpenAI’s board, removing every member who acted against him and replacing them with close allies.
2024: A former OpenAI board member publicly stated that Altman made oversight difficult by overtly lying and withholding information from the board.
2024: Law firm WilmerHale was hired to conduct an independent review of Altman. Despite verifying the accusations of lying and manipulation, the review was never released to the public and was even kept to verbal briefings, in an apparent attempt to whitewash Altman’s image.
Farrow and Marantz’s article adds even more juicy details to this shit heap. By now, you get the picture — if Altman says the glass is half full of wine, it’s brimming with piss. The man lies more than he breathes.
Firing & Rehiring
But did you catch that? Altman was kicked out of OpenAI because of his sociopathic levels of lying and manipulation. Originally, he was held accountable. But then, he was brought back. This is a critical puzzle piece we need in order to understand what is actually going on here.
Altman was explicitly let go because of mounting complaints of abusive behaviour, the fact that he was not “consistently candid” and his repeated pattern of lying to the board and employees. But there was another factor. It turns out the board had known about all this for years. The tipping point was when they found out that Altman had hidden his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund from them. This major breach of trust and attempt to conceal a serious conflict of interest (given that the fund had invested in ventures Altman had personally backed) was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.
So, board members moved to oust Altman, and he was out by November 17th, 2023. It would be another year until he was removed as owner of the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Then, by November 22nd, Altman was reinstated as CEO. Why? Why on Earth would a company take back someone who is such a blatant liability?
Well, when you look at who wanted him back and why, it makes perfect sense.
Microsoft, by far OpenAI’s largest investor, put immense pressure on OpenAI to reinstate Altman. They hired Altman as head of their AI division and welcomed in any employee who wanted to jump ship with him. Microsoft even backed a letter from employees threatening to quit if Altman wasn’t reinstated. After their backing, more than 90% of OpenAI’s 770 strong workforce signed the letter.
Why did they do this? Well, OpenAI employees were paid in part in shares, and Microsoft held a major stake in OpenAI’s for-profit division. When Altman was let go, he was in the process of signing an employee share sale deal with Thrive Capital which would have valued the company at $86 billion, or more than double its previous worth.
In other words, Altman was about to make Microsoft and OpenAI employees a bucketload of money. Employees could cash out their equity before the company went public, and Microsoft’s shares in OpenAI would be valued higher.
Crucially, Thrive Capital is totally controlled by Joshua Kushner. As Farrow and Marantz pointed out, Kushner and Altman have a deep personal connection, having known each other since 2011. Kushner reportedly believed that the value of OpenAI was Altman, not its proprietary technology, and was worried his investment would be worthless after Altman’s departure. Bear in mind that OpenAI employees have since claimed that Altman can’t code and doesn’t understand basic machine learning concepts. Altman’s value to Kushner was not as an AI savant but something else. So, he withheld the giant investment until Altman was reinstated. We will get onto why he valued Altman so highly in a minute.
OpenAI’s board was essentially strong-armed into bringing Altman back.
However, Altman had some demands. He would only agree to come back if the board was completely reshuffled and stuffed with his allies. This effectively rigged the one system meant to hold him to account in his favour. Because OpenAI had no choice, they submitted to his demands, and Altman was back as CEO less than a week after his firing.
So now Altman is back at the helm and, instead of being punished for his conduct, he has been praised and rewarded for it, with one of the few systems in place to prevent his deceitfulness being eroded to the point of futility.
What did Altman do next?
The Conflicts of Interest
Before we carry on, it’s worth reminding you that OpenAI is a cash-burning machine that is running deeper and deeper into the red as it gets further away from profitability. It does not have the available cash to do anything other than fund its own survival. If you want to know more, read my previous article here.
Yet, despite all of these factors, since his return, Altman has channeled OpenAI’s investment into several major and questionable deals.
Recently, Altman asked OpenAI to invest a whopping $500 million into nuclear fusion startup Helion. Helion, like every other company, is still lightyears away from generating power from fusion, let alone making it commercially viable. Did I mention that Altman is one of their biggest investors, having piled $375 million of his own money into the venture, and that if OpenAI had invested this money, his shares would jump in value? Unsurprisingly, Altman didn’t step down from his role as chairman at Helion to make this deal; instead, he waited until his efforts to push it through were made public before stepping down! This was such a blatant conflict of interest that OpenAI employees avoided discussing it in their Slack channel out of fear that what they said there might end up in court.
OpenAI did refuse to invest $500 million, almost certainly because of the legal mess and optics involved. But it still signed an agreement to buy 50 GW of future power from Helion by 2035, equivalent to 12.5% of Helion’s own projected power output. This deal, along with similar ones from Microsoft (given that the ties between Altman and Microsoft run much deeper than you might think) legitimises Helion’s laughably fanciful power generation projections, which has enabled it to raise billions of dollars elsewhere. So, while OpenAI prevented Altman’s open attempt at corruption, it did allow for a wild abuse of power.
Something similar happened a few months prior with Stoke Space, which is a SpaceX clone startup that aims to produce its own reusable rockets. Despite being founded seven years ago, they have yet to even attempt a launch. Altman is also a major investor in Stoke Space through his VC firm Hydrazine. Yet, Altman wanted OpenAI to acquire Stoke Space under the guise that it would enable OpenAI to compete with SpaceX’s orbital data centres. Just to clarify, the idea of orbital data centres is utterly fucking moronic (read more here), and Stoke Space is years away from being able to launch anything into space, let alone a tonne of them. Such an acquisition would not only have been a considerable drain on OpenAI’s finances, but it also wouldn’t have benefitted them. The only entity that would have benefitted from such a deal is Altman’s wallet. Despite Altman’s attempts, this deal did not go through.
However, others did. For example, in January, OpenAI announced its plans to invest in Merge Labs, a brain-computer communications startup and Neuralink competitor. This was surprising, as Merge is miles behind Neuralink, and even Neuralink’s technology isn’t exactly a paragon of success in this industry. It would make significantly more sense for OpenAI to partner with a company like Synchron, which has leading technology and strategic partnerships with other OpenAI partners like Nvidia. So why choose Merge? Well, while Altman doesn’t have equity in the company, he is still a co-founder and sits on its board. Let’s not forget that just because he doesn’t currently own equity doesn’t mean he won’t in the future. In order to align them with shareholders, board members are often paid overwhelmingly in deferred shares (which involves being paid a fixed number of shares at a later date). So again, while this deal is actively robbing OpenAI of the capital it needs to stay afloat, it has the potential to be a serious boon for Altman.
There are other examples of this grift, such as Altman directing OpenAI to buy his mate’s podcast for more than $100 million dollars. Keep in mind, these are the examples that we know of. He hid his involvement with the OpenAI Startup Fund from OpenAI’s own board members for years, and we know the ways he invests in companies, or obtains vested interests in companies, are varied and complex. Additionally, we know from the likes of A More Perfect Union that Altman’s ties to AI-related companies are colossal and murky. Let’s not forget that the OpenAI’s board is now firmly planted in Altman’s pocket and is likely more willing to conceal his actions.
I’m going to take a moment to ask you a question. What do you think about of all of this? I mean it — please come to your own conclusions. Is there a word in your mind that sums up these actions?
For me, the words ‘corruption’, ‘embezzlement’, ‘fraud’ and ‘conman’ spring to mind.
The Carbon Copy
Now I’m going to ask you a second question. Does this remind you of anyone in particular? Being rewarded for constantly lying, rigging a board, misusing company funds for personal enrichment and investors valuing the CEO over the actual business.
That’s right, Altman is just a subpar copy of Elon Musk.
For one, Musk also lies through his teeth. From deceiving investors and the Tesla board about taking Tesla private, to claiming Teslas will be an appreciating asset, and repeatedly asserting that Tesla will crack the enigma that is self-driving cars next year, he lies more than he urinates. For someone with a ketamine problem, that is damn impressive.
Musk also has similar issues regarding conflict of interest and self-enrichment . He influenced Tesla to buy out his failing solar panel company SolarCity for $2.6 billion and then completely liquidated it. He diverted $500 million worth of AI chips ordered for Tesla to xAI. He instructed SpaceX to buy nearly 20% of Cybertrucks in 2025 Q4, despite not needing them. He even propelled Tesla to invest $2 billion into xAI, which significantly raised the company’s value. However, there are too many malicious and dishonest things Musk has done with Tesla to go into great detail here.
Why haven’t the board held him to account for all of this? Well, Musk’s $56 billion pay packet explains that rather nicely. This ludicrous deal was thrown out by a judge, as she found that the board members were too heavily influenced by Musk to have been impartial enough to approve such an incentive. Indeed, Tesla’s board members are some of the highest paid in the US, and they are predominantly paid in Tesla stock. So, like Altman, Musk has effectively rigged the board.
There have been numerous times shareholders and even Tesla’s board have moved to replace Musk. But they always fail. Why?
It is because they value Musk’s lies and manipulation more than Tesla. For example, Gary Black, a hedge fund manager who heavily backs Tesla, publicly stated that if Musk stepped down, Tesla’s stock could fall by 20% to 25%. A recent report from Ryan Brinkman at JP Morgan found that Tesla shares are 60% over-valued because of Musk’s ‘cult of personality’.
But what is Musk’s personality? He has no charm, no charisma. His only valuable trait is his lying. He claims to have all the answers when he has nothing, which is the definition of all brag, no shorts. All he does is use a diatribe of lies to bamboozle, create an illusion, and sell it to the gullible.
That is why investors back Musk — not in spite of his lies and manipulation, but because that is what is valuable. It doesn’t matter that Musk’s actions are damaging Tesla beyond belief (read more here). That is not what they invested in. They invested in the narrative, the lies, the grift.
Altman has done the same. Using his tsunami of bullshit as a weapon to extract value from the market, he has investors backing his giant fibby whoppers to the hilt He has divided and conquered the corporate structure of OpenAI to enable this deceit to go unchecked. Under the cover of all of this, he uses his position of power to corruptly self-enrich himself to an enormous extent. Yet the investors who gave him all this power do nothing to stop it, because that is the point of it all.
The Modern Reality
This is what happens when you do nothing but prioritise shareholder value. When the entire focus is to ‘make line go up,’ and totally ignore what is actually propping it up. It is the result of an economy and a corporate elite that have devolved into hollow, blind greed. Rather than valuing actual growth, tangible results, or even simple business fundamentals, these corporations place their value in the slimiest sociopaths ever to grace this beautiful Earth, as they are the ones who can extract the most from it and us.
Yes, Altman is a double-dealing, deceitful weirdo. We should be pointing at him and demanding he is removed from his position of power. But this is a sickness that goes far deeper than OpenAI.
Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!
Double dealing, circular funding, lies and where are the regulators? Yep lost those with 2 critical national elections.