OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously doesn’t have any equity in his own company. He now says he wishes he had some — but for some unexpected reasons.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that he wished he had equity in OpenAI because it would’ve led to fewer conspiracy theories about his true motives. “(I) wish I had taken equity a long time ago and I think it would have led to far fewer conspiracy theories; people seem very able to understand “ok that dude is doing it because he wants more money” but less so “he just thinks technology is cool and he likes having some ability to influence the evolution of technology and society”. It was a crazy tone-deaf thing to try to make the point “i already have enough money”,” he said on a post on X.
“If i were like, a sports star or an artist or something, and just really cared about doing a great job at my thing, and was up at 5 am practicing free throws or whatever, that would seem pretty normal right? The first part of OpenAI was unbelievably fun; we did what i believe is the most important scientific work of this generation or possibly a much greater time period than that. This current part is less fun but still rewarding. It is extremely painful as you say and often tempting to nope out on any given day, but the chance to really “make a dent in the universe” is more than worth it; most people don’t get that chance to such an extent, and i am very grateful,” he added.
“I genuinely believe the work we are doing will be a transformatively positive thing, and if we didn’t exist, the world would have gone in a slightly different and probably worse direction. (Working hard was always an extremely easy trade until I had a kid, and now an extremely hard trade.),” Altman added.
“I believe that AGI will be the most important technology humanity has yet built, i am very grateful to get to play an important role in that and work with such great colleagues, and I like having an interesting life,” Altman said.
Altman’s comments seemed to be spurred by Musk’s reaction on the news that OpenAI was reportedly looking to IPO at a valuation of $1 trillion in a couple of years. An X user shared a quote from Altman from two years ago, when he’d told US lawmakers that he didn’t have equity in OpenAI, and was working as its CEO “because he liked it”. Musk now responded to that post with an emoji, indicating he didn’t believe that was the case.
Musk and Altman have been at loggerheads for a while since Musk had left OpenAI which he had co-founded and bankrolled in its early days. But Sam Altman has also faced scrutiny over some of his other actions at OpenAI, including getting into business deals with companies he has stakes in, like Reddit, and acquiring other companies he has stakes in, like the company behind the AI assistant Sky. Altman has also been viewed with suspicion over some of his other projects, including Worldcoin, which aims to take retinal scans of people in order to be able to identify them, and has been getting users to scan their retinas in exchange for its own cryptocurrency. There have been some other incidents too, including the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, whose parents allege that Altman had a role in his demise. Apart from this, Altman has battled allegations of sexual abuse leveled by his own sister from when they were children, which have been denied by Altman, his brother and their mother. And while having equity in OpenAI would’ve make Altman’s life slightly easier, given the high-stakes world of AI he’s gotten himself in, it likely wouldn’t have been without controversy.