In a reality far, far from ours, AI multi-billionaires squabble and bicker, and throw lawsuits around like confetti, while vying for the attention of the President of the United States of America. Or maybe even, including him.
Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI is now in the crosshairs of planetary pest and presidential mentor-from-hell, Elon Musk. The latter is envious of the former, and so wants his toys. Sam is having none of it.
How did it all get to this?
At the age of eight, which many might think is the emotional peak some Silicon Valley billionaires attain once they make the boardroom, Sam Altman received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and began to learn how to code and take apart computer hardware. He attended John Burroughs School, a private school in Ladue, Missouri. In 2005, after two years at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out without earning a bachelor’s degree.
That same year, at the age of 19, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. As CEO, he raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company, including an initial investment of $5 million from Patrick Chung of Xfund and his team at New Enterprise Associates, followed by investments from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator. In March 2012, after Loopt failed to gain significant user traction, the Green Dot Corporation acquired the company for $43.4 million.
In 2011, Altman became a partner at Y Combinator (YC), a startup accelerator that invests in a wide range of startups, initially working part-time. In February 2014, he was named president of YC by co-founder Paul Graham. In a 2014 blog post, Altman stated that the total valuation of YC companies had surpassed $65 billion, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits, and Stripe.
In December 2015, Altman co-founded OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organisation. It was initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised $1 billion. In March 2019, Altman left Y Combinator to focus full-time on OpenAI as CEO. By the summer of 2019, he had helped raise $1 billion from Microsoft. OpenAI was established with the goal of promoting and developing friendly AI for the benefit of humanity.
In September 2016, Altman announced his expanded role as president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator and other units.
In March 2019, YC announced Altman’s transition from president to a less hands-on role as chairman of the board, allowing him to focus on OpenAI. This decision came shortly after YC announced it would move its headquarters to San Francisco. As of early 2020, he was no longer affiliated with YC.
On November 17th, 2023, OpenAI’s board announced that they had made the decision to remove Altman as CEO and Greg Brockman from the board, both of whom were co-founders. The announcement cited that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” in a public announcement on the OpenAI blog.
In response, Brockman resigned from his role as President of OpenAI. The day after Altman was removed, The Verge reported that Altman and the board were in talks to bring him back to OpenAI. On November 20, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.
Two days later, OpenAI employees published an open letter to the board threatening to leave OpenAI and join Microsoft, where all employees had been promised jobs unless all board members stepped down and reinstated Altman as CEO. 505 employees initially signed, later growing to over 700 out of 770 total employees.
Bizarrely, this included Ilya Sutskever, who had previously been a strong advocate for firing Altman but now had apologised stating on Twitter, “I regret my participation in the board’s actions.” Late in the night on November 20th, OpenAI announced that they had reached an “agreement in principle” for Altman to return as CEO and Brockman to return as president. The current board was to resign, other than D’Angelo, who was kept to represent the views of the previous board. On March 8th, 2024, OpenAI announced that Altman would rejoin the board of directors.
However, since his reinstatement, new board members have accused Altman of ‘chaotic behaviour’, ‘psychological abuse’ and ‘lying to the board,’, especially with retaliation feared by staff at the time of his absence from OpenAI’s board.
The now public rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk has been ramped up to a new phase reminiscent of competition for Daddy’s total attention. Both men aim to reshape the modern world and are vying for President Donald Trump’s support to expedite their plans.
Altman’s company, OpenAI, and Musk’s ventures—including SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—rely, to varying degrees, on federal funding, permits, and regulatory backing. The president could influence who makes the next significant AI breakthrough, whether Musk can successfully send a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s ambitious investments in nuclear energy, particularly fusion reactors, will succeed.
Understanding the competition between these two figures sheds light on Trump’s approach to governance, characterised by patronage, faux-dealmaking and no small amount of fawning. The rivalry also reveals how tech giants have conformed to the new administration. Executives who once promoted a vision of a future dominated by advanced AI, space exploration, and limitless clean energy have submitted to a president who has stifled free expression, scientific research, and even the mention of climate change in government discourse. Why? Simply because aligning with him serves their agendas.
In some cases, tech leaders genuinely adhere to the MAGA ideology. Altman’s shift towards MAGA is widely interpreted as a search for support. In 2017, as Trump’s first term began, Altman had tweeted, “I think Trump is terrible and few things would make me happier than him not being president.”
He had also contemplated running for governor of California in the 2018 election but later decided not to enter. In 2019, Altman held a fundraiser at his home in San Francisco for 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and fellow tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang. In May 2020, Altman donated $250,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC supporting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Altman supports land value taxation and the payment of universal basic income (UBI) – both operating in Scandinavia, and ideas distinctly of the left within fiscal political ideologies.
This time around, however, in order to curry favour, he has performed a one-eighty, and stated, “I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” There are times when candour helps and others when discretion is king. One never knows when you are required to take tea with the devil. However, it’s fairly evident that Altman’s main trick that he needs to pull off with Trump, is to turn comedian George Burns’ quip, “Sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made…” into a working reality.
In the months leading to the election, Altman and OpenAI sought connections to Trump supporters to gain favour, according to The New York Times. In June, two of the start-up’s executives met with Trump in Las Vegas to showcase their technology and discuss their land and energy needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s technological advantage over xAI, Google, Anthropic, and other companies has diminished. The relationship between OpenAI and its main financial backer, Microsoft, has also deteriorated.
OpenAI is actively looking for other corporate partners despite Microsoft’s assurance that it will remain a key collaborator. Over the past year, several senior researchers have left, and the start-up faces multiple lawsuits and investigations. A tame administration could give Altman a crucial boost to maintain his firm’s diminishing edge in the AI race.
Meanwhile, despite his criticisms of government inefficiency, Musk significantly depends on federal support. Over the past decade, his companies have been awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA for its rocket operations and is currently testing its Starlink technology to enhance the Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system despite an existing $2 billion contract with Verizon.
With declining sales and a stagnant model lineup, Tesla could greatly benefit from favourable regulations regarding self-driving cars. Additionally, Musk seems envious, in the most puerile and childish of manners, of Altman’s rising status in Silicon Valley; he launched xAI shortly after the debut of ChatGPT and has called Altman “Scam Altman.”
Musk also made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI, which the company’s board rejected. “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman remarked during a Bloomberg Television interview the next day. “I feel for the guy.”
His more barbed social media response on X (formerly Twitter, of all places) read, “No thanks, but we’d be willing to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you’re interested…”
Any advantages that OpenAI might gain from Trump could similarly benefit xAI. Altman and Musk both aim to build data centres that require substantial electricity—each potentially requiring as much energy as a large nuclear reactor or even several, enough to power millions of American homes.
The government can facilitate access to federal lands for constructing data centres and power plants and expedite the development of natural gas or nuclear facilities. Trump might also seek to streamline the often lengthy permitting process for transmission lines that transport electricity to these data centres, and he could influence the regulatory environment to favour the tech industry.
Musk has solidified his position in Trump’s inner circle, acting as a surrogate during the campaign and leading efforts to reform the civil service. He has intertwined his political beliefs—reactionary, authoritarian, and nativist views—with Trump’s approach. In so doing, Altman has quietly gained the president’s trust, although with a narrower focus on American dominance in AI. He advocates for the importance of U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence over China.
But when all is said and done, publicly, Musk and Altman behave like two children struggling with the concept of growing up. Naturally, there have been legal writs and counter-claims flying around between them. And neither looks like maturing any time soon.
That Altman is on Musk’s radar for his ire shows that he must be doing something right, although no one knows where this peacocking will end. It could just be that – maybe – public playground spats between two insecure multi-billionaires are the very thing that inspires each other in their respective bouts of puerile one-upmanship to do better. Maybe.
I bet no one ever mentions that as a method of improving creativity in TED talks.
