[IG_Semmelweiss]

The thesis is as follows:

OpenAI receives funds as a non-profit.

Some of those funds are redirected to for profit ventures.

Critically, the GM (Altman) of the nonprofit owns shares of the for-profit ventures, that OpenAI funds were redirected into.

A regular company could and does invest in any company even when there's a conflict, as long as the conflict is disclosed and the Board votes in favor of it. There's no criminal element there.

The problem is introduced in Altman's case if

(a) there was no disclosure (red flag) and/or

(b) nonprofit that received the funds, is putting money into things not aligned with the 501(c)(3) mission.

I'm not sure if either (a) or (b) are criminal, but they don't pass the smell test, which is why Altman is being sued in civil court, unrelated to the congressional investigation talked about in the article

[JumpCrisscross]

The thesis is Altman ran around saying he was building something that will kill everyone, then backed off to saying he’ll just kill everyone’s jobs.

When data centers and a war of choice pushed inflation to 7+% [1], Republicans in the Congress were left scrambling for a scapegoat. And Sam is a terrific scapegoat. He has no public shareholders like the more hated Zuckerberg and Bezos [2]. Yet he has carved for himself a uniquely-visibly throne for a private-company boss. (His only rival for scapegoatiness is Musk. But he’s inoculated from Republicans by his blatant partisanship.)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm 0.6% MoM in April, 0.9% MoM in March

[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/06/11/tech-ceo-poll-25/

[mywittyname]

Also, doesn't musk hate him? I have to imagine he's behind this.

[JumpCrisscross]

> have to imagine he's behind this

Is Musk probably throwing fuel on the fire? Yes, probably. (Though we have no proof of this.)

Is Musk causing this? No. This is mainly Altman’s doing. The hyperbole. The lying. The leverage. The pomp. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos haven’t painted a target on themselves like he has. (To the point that I’m borderline sympathetic.)

[dbreunig]

Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge makes a strong case we _do_ have proof that Musk is actively gathering and throwing fuel on the fire: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/929129/s...

> But the thing is, Molo doesn’t actually have to be good at this job, because the point of this trial isn’t to win — though I’m sure Musk wouldn’t mind a win. The point is to punish Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI. Musk has done that pretty thoroughly — reinforcing in the public’s mind that Altman is a liar and a snake. This morning, I read an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal that assorted Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee wanted to look into Sam Altman’s investments. References to the trial are peppered throughout the article.

[JumpCrisscross]

Oh sure, the trial is maybe 5% a Hail Mary and 95% about distracting and disrupting OpenAI. I read "behind this" to mean more-clandestine moves, e.g. planting stories, conducting and leaking oppo, amplifying negative media on X, et cetera.

[keeda]

It does seem like there is a ton of negative PR and sentiment on social media (including HN) about anything Altman and even Dario do. Like, way more than warranted. It looks more and more like a coordinated campaign, a la https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Elon even explicitly threatened the OpenAI guys that they would be "the most hated" people on earth, and given what we've seen him do with Twitter, I strongly suspect there indeed is a submarine with Elon at the periscope.

Altman may be getting the brunt of the AI backlash, but the impact of AI is still extremely preliminary, and it will happen regardless of anything he does. As you mentioned, it doesn't help that these guys are telling the world AI will disrupt all the jobs but... at this point, I think they're just being honest.

As shifty as Altman is, I wonder how he gets more hate than Elon, who has objectively done way more concrete damage to the world.

[boringg]

Doesn't Sam Altman famously not own OpenAI? His whole arrangement is so shady.

[s1artibartfast]

So a non-profit can absolute invest in or own a for-profit subsidary. This is extremely common. The idea is that the for-profit returns will flow back to the non-profit and remain dedicated to the non-profit mission.

Where things get really shady and run the risk of IRS violations is when the leadership of the non-profit has a seperate for profit stake in the subsidary.

[boringg]

When your public position is that you don't own equity in the company it implies that you aren't making money off of it. However if you have all sorts of side deals through intermediaries and you are making money off the entity it looks quite bad.

[s1artibartfast]

Perhaps to some that don't know what equity means.

I dont think it looks bad. The devil is always in the details: Were helion and reddit deals fair market value or self dealing?

[dagamer34]

Sam has stake in Y Combinator from when he was CEO, who also has an ownership stake in OpenAI.

So to say that he owns no part of OpenAI is silly.

[meowface]

Is there a more benign explanation for these things? Altman is undeniably famously cagey and political but despite most of the tech and non-tech worlds at this point seeing him as some kind of con artist, I still kind of want to try to believe he's not.

No doubt some of OpenAI's founding principles like "stop + assist if a competitor gets to AGI first" are likely flying out the window, perhaps in part due to him and also as one might anticipate of initial lofty ideals and promises, but even with the recent New Yorker and other articles he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.

[mcmcmc]

> he seems like someone who maybe regularly placates people to avoid personal problems and lies to get out of trouble rather than a Machiavellian tech baron.

This would be more plausible were it not for the staggering amount of wealth he’s amassed through those lies.

[mrhottakes]

When someone tells you who they are, you should believe them.

[jjulius]

> ... I still kind of want to try to believe he's not.

Asking genuinely - why?

[hx8]

What if it's actually super-intelligence and a human aligned visionary is at the helm. The good case is very good.

[yifanl]

If you give me a hundred dollars, I promise I'll come back tomorrow and hand you thirty trillion dollars.

[deaton]

If he's our representative in the era of superintelligence, we are all screwed.

[saulpw]

I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ. We can make up "what if"s all day but it's meaningless to even discuss them if you don't have a shred of evidence to support the claim.

[latexr]

> I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ.

Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSZcxXe7IQ

[hx8]

Exactly. The second coming of Christ would be a very good case.

Why people want to believe Altman is good is about the same reason people want to believe in the second coming.

[estearum]

Uhh literally what is one thing Sam has done or said that demonstrates he's either human-aligned or visionary?

[meowface]

I could write a giant response to this with dozens of quotes from him and others and various sources but you would just say it's all lies/posturing, so it would not be a good use of my time. I will say that him becoming one of the most prominent funders and promoters of UBI research/experiments 6 years before GPT-3 is probably not a coincidence, though. OpenAI releasing a paper a month ago strongly suggesting the US move towards a more socialist economic system to handle massive economic upheaval is also probably not a coincidence. He obviously founded OpenAI with the primary intent of making AI so that they could make it go well instead of poorly, and it going well means properly addressing mass unemployment, biosecurity risks, some degree of widely distributed access so that the very poorest get meaningful use of the exact same intelligence as what the very richest get to use, etc.

[latexr]

Come on… The guy who said he can’t imagine caring for his child without consulting ChatGPT… The guy who said he didn’t know how to make revenue with ChatGPT, and made a “soft promise” to investors they’d somehow achieve AGI then ask it how to make money… The guy who made a cryptocurrency scam that was banned in multiple countries… The guy who everyone around him says he’s a con artist and a sociopath… That guy? Really?

[meowface]

Really. That guy. I'm afraid you're one side of the coin in https://paulgraham.com/fh.html. Paul himself would agree with me on that if he were to read your post.

[grey-area]

His own sister accused him of sexual assault.

He was fired from his first startup.

He was abruptly fired from ycombinator in shady circumstances.

He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control.

He took OpenAI from being a non-profit to a for-profit, with obvious benefits to whoever controls it.

He was massively misleading about the capabilities of his product and predicted AGI within years.

At some point the pattern of all these events should have some weight in your judgement of him, no?

[meowface]

Paul Graham, founder of the website we're on, still says he likes and trusts him. He just was annoyed he was constantly distracted by AI stuff when he was supposed to be running YC as president (which bears no resemblance to any current events...).

He, at worst, finds him to have been (at some point) incompetent, which is very different from finding him immoral. Paul keeps replying to tweets to clarify this when people continue to misportray his stance.

"He was accused by the OpenAI board of lying to them, ousted, and somehow managed to regain control." is the only thing you wrote which is plainly true and valid to state.

I am sure there may exist good, strong criticisms, but your argument is so tendentiously gish-gallopy that it will if anything just make people more likely to disbelieve his critics. (Not that I would do that, since that'd be just as fallacious.)

Why would OpenAI employees all still be happily working for him and publicly supporting him? Why is the company still so successful, and the leader? Why wouldn't most of them have left in droves to Anthropic or elsewhere, by now? Especially given most technical employees at OpenAI (justifiably) share the eschatological views of AI shared' by Anthropic staff and other TESCREALists, in which case they really really try to be careful about who will be responsible for potential future superintelligence. The board and some executives disliked and distrusted him but it's unclear many other people there did or do now. And I'm not just talking about the petition but the people who have continued working there for years afterwards.

[grey-area]

We’ll see in time if your confident trust in Sam Altman’s good nature is justified.

Personally if someone is found to be untrustworthy by multiple people and does weird stuff (like moving from open non-profit to for profit), I trust them a lot less. I don’t know him so don’t pass judgment but wouldn’t trust him and certainly wouldn’t give his statements credence since he’s been so spectacularly wrong on AI outcomes.

As to people at OpenAI and investors in OpenAI, I certainly wouldn’t expect them to denigrate their CEO just before an IPO, the one who fought off the board and installed his own place men and thus has complete control; it is not in their interests to do so.

If there is a bust after this boom I think quite a lot of bad behaviour and circular deals from The main players (nvidia, OpenAI, MS etc) will be revealed at that point. In a financial boom a lot gets hidden.

[elmomle]

He will say whatever it takes to get the result he wants. That's manipulative and, when pursued as a lifestyle, sociopathic.

Living like that is corrupting. When you treat humans like objects, the question of your starting intentions is really secondary.

[genxy]

I like his tactic of talking to everyone individually to be able to tell each person exactly what they want to hear. I now use that one all the time.

[funimpoded]

Beware that there exist people who will cut you out of their lives—professional, personal, whatever—completely, likely with no warning, and possibly loudly, publicly, and with-receipts (if they’ve seen this kind of thing before or have thought through what your next steps will be after they cut you out) if they find out you do this.

All it takes is for a few of them to start comparing notes behind your back. Shit goes sideways extremely fast for people pulling this whose victims start talking to each other without them as the intermediary.

[genxy]

The secret is to be able to fail up at a rate higher than you burn the ecosystem around you. You are gone before people notice. That and being funny with enough charisma that it doesn't matter. Sam can't actually operate in this environment, everyone already knows his manipulative schticks.

This is one of the reasons that startups prefer the young, they often haven't been exposed to the grift and the manipulation. As a tech bro sociopath, I'd be wary of joining a startup with a mixture of ages, genders, experiences across the spectrum of ICs and management. They probably have experienced too much to be griftable in the same ways as an org stacked with young ICs. You also want to make sure that there are other people in the management chain that are more emotionally unstable. It takes much of the focus off of ones own pathologies.

Happy Hacking!

[s1artibartfast]

what did he do to you?

[bfivyvysj]

We already reached agi a while ago.

[rurp]

Remember when Altman was going around saying he doesn't take a salary, he's just doing the job for the good of humanity? It kind of blew my mind how many people believed him. Even on HN, where much of the community knew something about his pre-OpenAI days, there were plenty of credulous posts defending him as some sort of altruist.

I guess this is why we keep seeing transparent lies and scams from leading tech and business individuals; the lies often work.

[Henchman21]

Not only do lies work, there is also no punishment at all for it.

[typeofhuman]

quite the opposite

[Henchman21]

I await my education on why lies don't work and how people are routinely punished for it?

[typeofhuman]

Please excuse me, I was implying they get the opposite of punishment, they get rewarded for their lies.

[Henchman21]

Indeed, my misread :)

[twohaibei]

I think he meant there is no punishment... quite the opposite.

[fauigerzigerk]

>The problem is introduced in Altman's case if (a) there was no disclosure (red flag)

The article says the investments were disclosed:

"OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor defended Altman in a court hearing Monday, testifying that Altman had been “forthright” and “proactive and transparent” about his involvements in other companies. Altman recused himself from recent discussions about a deal between OpenAI and Helion as well, The Wall Street Journal reported."

[voncheese]

The problem with the current political situation/administration in the US is that there's so much existing conflict of interest going on that anytime the government investigates concerns about conflict of interest, it feels politically motivated because of the uneven investigation.

[randerson]

Even if the board votes in favor, wouldn't it be tax evasion to fund a for-profit corporation using a 503(c)(3) - which is tax deductible for donors?

[yieldcrv]

No, non profits can invest in anything. Publicly traded stocks are c-corps too, thats how endowments grow. There is nothing that distinguishes liquid vs illiquid c-corp shares.

Regarding founder ownership, the rules are extremely flexible like a non profit director can’t own more than 20 voting or 35% total of the business venture

but if it happens then it just needs to be remedied within 3 years

so for venture style deals that’s plenty of time to dilute down, and the little known secret in the startup space is that the founders non profit steps in as the lead investor, so all the other investors arent just twiddling their thumbs waiting for a founder to convince someone, it just closes. Other investors dilute founder and non profit, everything is compliant, value is created. Both for profit and non profit side will be tax free, due to QSBS

[s1artibartfast]

some of the largest for profit investors are non-profits.

It is all about if you can get the money back out.

[cyanydeez]

no, the thesis is: can the fascists control sam altman.

[ajross]

That is emphatically NOT the thesis of the linked article. That's the argument made by the politicians being quoted and enumerated. What the article is trying to tell you is that these actions are entirely partisan, and reflect the desires and statements of the largest and wealthiest republican donor, who happens to own a competing interest.

You can think Altman is a bad person and OpenAI is something of a scam and still recognize that using the government as a tool to corruptly hobble your competition is a horrifyingly bad thing.

These are awful times we live in, I really fear what we'll have to be telling our grandkids. Will it be just a cautionary tale about the dangers of populism and partisanship or will it be sad, wistful tales about how much better things were... "before"?