Sam’s Club: Inside Altman’s AI World, Featuring Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel

Sam Altman in point of fact needs to be favored. “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 clear of years of protecting the tech innovator’s occupation and the upward thrust of ChatGPT. But it’s additionally the thread that runs thru Atlman’s public existence extra extensively, Hagey tells Vanity Fair editor in leader Radhika Jones, together with govt editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, on the most recent episode of Inside the Hive. In it, Hagey, who’s popping out with a e book on Altman subsequent month, titled The Optimist, is going deep on Altman’s modern politics, his friendship with Peter Thiel, his feud with Elon Musk, and his dealings with Donald Trump, together with his temporary go out from OpenAI—a.ok.a. “The Blip”—and imaginative and prescient for this probably world-altering era.

The very first thing to find out about Altman is that he’s no longer 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 building. In 2016, then again, their friendship used to be examined when Thiel “became really the only person just about in all of tech to support Donald Trump,” recounts Hagey. Despite being ardently hostile to 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 believe a proper front 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 advised Hagey within the e book he didn’t need to run for president.)

Incidentally, Altman used to be just about booted from the room in 2023, when the OpenAI founder used to be unexpectedly fired by means of the corporate’s board of administrators over a insecurity in his management. Although he used to be reinstated after inside 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 path, being favored is already proving very important to staying afloat amid the second one presidency of Trump, who governs by means of a loyalty-first means. So some distance, from the appearance of Trump’s $500 billion partnership with OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle, Altman has controlled to get again within the president’s excellent graces. But given his yearslong feud with Musk, who’s additionally competing within the AI area, there’s no ensure that Altman will set up to stick out of the crosshairs. As Jones notes, there would possibly simply be a “bigger target on his back.”