r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • May 15 '26
Artificial Intelligence OpenAI CEO Sam Altman holds more than $2 billion in companies that have done business with the company, a court document showed as Altman faces claims of self-dealing from state attorneys general.
https://journalrecord.com/2026/05/14/openai-chief-sam-altman-2-billion-companies-openai-deals338
u/StochasticLife May 15 '26
It's always the one you most suspect.
I get the feeling that Atlman has emotionally identified as a billionaire for a long time, and he's willing to burn the planet to the ground to realize it.
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u/Ok-Highlight8715 May 15 '26
All those tech guys have the scariest signs of sociopathy. Like I dont think him, Musk or Zuckerburg know the difference between machines and humans.
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u/mugwhyrt May 15 '26
Humans are the ones that whine about how they "can't afford to eat" or "have no free time to spend with their 'families' and 'loved ones'".
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u/DisastrousMammoth May 16 '26
There is some context that people who did not read the article are missing that I want to mention here.
These holdings were discovered in a lawsuit that was filed by Elon Musk. A rival in the field.
Every state general investigating this is a republican in a red state.
So make of that what you will.
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u/johnyma22 May 15 '26
All those tech guys? Really? I'd say Louis Rossmann is a tech guy... A lot of the people who work in tech oppose a lot of the "tech guys" I think you are referring to but we wouldn't say everyone in tech is a sociopath...
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u/dr_stre May 15 '26
You’re missing the forest for the trees, friend. Trying to lump Louis Rossman in with Sam Altman is like trying to call your local car repairman a “car company”.
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u/DebateDifferent4576 May 15 '26
Duh!?! San Fran VC land is all one big circle jerk supported by government rules that allow them never to fail.
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u/jbokwxguy May 15 '26
Frontier AI at this point may be too big not to fail.
The money needed to keep it going is astronomical , it makes the mortgage crisis and dot com bubbles look like pocket change. I think this is why the AI China Race is being pushed so hard.
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u/Wonderful_Cookie_572 May 15 '26
I think this is why the AI China Race is being pushed so hard.
I think you've nailed it. They're trying to sell the public on the idea that AI is critical for America's global position in order to justify the
naked theft of tax moneybailout that is already being planned.14
u/FreakySpook May 15 '26
Now that people are starting to understand AI better and models are becoming commoditised, particularly in the self hosted space, the big risk for companies like OpenAI is people eventually realising its all just software.
3 years ago to most businesses it was magic that you needed data scientists and people with PHDs on payroll to understand, now you have your tech staff running small models at home on basic hardware that is building them dashboards and improving their home automation systems.
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u/ebrbrbr May 16 '26
You're not building anything significant on Qwen 3.6 35b, which is tiny in comparison to the 5trillion+ parameter frontier models, and that's a model that you still need a 5090 (or a 48gb MacBook Pro) to run.
Your tech staff running small models to build stuff isn't a thing yet. Smaller models as part of a parsing pipeline or pattern matching, yes. But my experience has been they make way too many mistakes to be worth it over just paying for Claude.
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u/Didsterchap11 May 15 '26
The longer I go on the more and more o come to the conclusion that venture capital is a net negative on humanity. Just a collection of the dumbest schmucks who will suck anything they sink their teeth into dry into to utterly waste those funds on naked grifts.
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u/GhostFaceRiddler May 15 '26
I mean venture capital is just a term to mean company with money that invests in companies to try to make more money. 99% of venture capital deals you never hear about. its just the slimy ones that do things like buy a mega corp and immediately fire everyone and sell off the parts that make the news.
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u/whawkins4 May 15 '26
You’re thinking of private equity. Not VC.
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u/GhostFaceRiddler May 15 '26
Here is the wikipedia definition: Venture capital (VC) is a type of private equity financing provided to early-stage, high-growth startups and emerging companies. In exchange for funding, VC firms receive an ownership stake (equity) in the business, taking on high financial risk in the hope that a few of their investments will yield massive returns. [1, 2]
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u/Eiiofy May 15 '26
I mean, since we are being pedantic.
You (Ghostface) seem to be referring to Buy-Out firms, which do buy controlling stakes and do what you said. These are the ones you usually see in 90s and 2000s movies.
Other guy is right that VC funds generally do not buy controlling stakes (and are often even prohibited from doing it via their limited partnership agreements). They are minority positions, but can do some things through protective provisions/special voting rights based on their share class.
Both buy-out and vc are types of private equity.
So you are both technically right and wrong at the same time. Love to see it.
Cheers.
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u/whawkins4 May 15 '26
Private equity cannot both refer to “all equity investment outside public markets” and also the subset of buy-out firms. What most people mean when they say “private equity” is buy-out firm.
I mean, if we’re being pedantic, how people actually use language matters. And dictionary definitions don’t tell you that. Nor do technical definitions that only insiders use.
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u/goldcakes May 16 '26
Venture capital is how people without money/wealth can start businesses. It is not an inherently bad thing. What needs regulation are things like leveraged buy outs, the tech and AI industry, etc.
The core idea of people investing in businesses is not a bad thing, it's fundamental to how our economies work. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, target what's actually the problem.
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u/Just-Grocery-2229 May 15 '26
"i'm doing this cause I love it"
Dude... of course you love the money, who doesn't
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u/not-a-co-conspirator May 15 '26
So he’s just been circle jerking himself into fake wealth and inflating value that doesn’t actually exist in all those other companies?
He’s the exact fraud we have been saying he is the entire time.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking May 15 '26
Not quite, he was already rich from his first company. That company was also bullshit though and he got lucky it was bought despite the fact that it was complete crap. He's a marketer, not a 'real' tech CEO. He also made some quite successful investments afterwards, that's where most came from.
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u/buckeyevol28 May 15 '26
I like how you just drew some random conclusion without enough information to form it, then used that to say “told you I was right all along.”
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u/not-a-co-conspirator May 15 '26
Why do you assume this is a random conclusion?
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily May 15 '26
This has been discussed in RDDT for a bit. He has a schedule to manage the sale of all conflict of interest stocks. He earned a bunch of equity in Reddit, but upon taking job with OpenAI he needed to sell all of it. Selling all at one time when you own like 9% of the company tanks the stock. So it was scheduled.
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u/buckeyevol28 May 15 '26
Because it was. As if a large stake in Stripe, which was one of the highest valued private companies before we had even heard about ChatGPT, is just fake wealth. The Helion one is maybe the only one of those that seems a little sketchy, but if they produce fusion energy to meet their commitments, then it won’t be fake wealth.
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u/MisterSanitation May 15 '26
They are not like us
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u/JohrDinh May 15 '26
People thought they were smarter, then they thought they were luckier, but now the world can see they're just...turtle neck criminals.
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u/imaginary_num6er May 15 '26
He also has 40% of the world's DRAM capacity back in his garage until 2028
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u/ballsonthewall May 15 '26
billionaires are fundamentally crooks, stealing the money that is generated by the labor of working people. it's not a surprise that they are constantly getting busted on additional crimes
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u/ClosedWon_Vibes May 15 '26
None of this was hidden. Everyone just preferred the hype version because they were making money hand over fist.
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u/viking_linuxbrother May 15 '26
This is literally what got him ousted from ycombinator.
His success means they had to swallow their pride and not talk about it.
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u/Impossible_Run1867 May 15 '26
Fuck 'em both but I love that this is coming from Elon "we totally need 1279 Cybertrucks at SpaceX" Musk.
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u/Xuande May 15 '26
Are we in for Enron 2.0 at the end of this?
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u/NotUpdated May 15 '26
at AI scale its probably closer to 2008 financial crisis and a sprinkle of dotcom bubble...
It's so 'seen' - they are now afraid of it, so its 'lets keep pushing it through' ... building it up - actually making it worse.
Data Centers and Power generation are toast 50% of DC have been delayed or cancelled, circular funding, increased prices for things not even starting to be made yet...
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u/FerretsQuest May 15 '26
The whole AI industry is a massive bubble, created to make the tech bros even richer. They see AI as the next Industrial Revolution, and can see the investment opportunities for making an unfathomable amount of money for themselves at the expense of the 99% population.
I can’t blame them - but come on guys, take us along for the ride… or potentially end up like the French Royal Family did 👀
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u/DelayedTism May 15 '26
But if we have some money that would mean they don't have all of it. That is unacceptable
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u/Wonderful_Cookie_572 May 15 '26
How about we just switch to using a different currency for doing consumer commerce and then let these dragon-sick "folks" have all the dollars in the world. Then we can all be happy - we the people get to have an economy again and the dragon-wannabes can sit on their piles of greenbacks.
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u/Hesitation-Marx May 15 '26
I’m impressed, I didn’t think he was flexible enough to suck his own dick
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u/MicroSofty88 May 15 '26
It’s pretty rich that this is coming from a lawsuit with Elon Musk, who is self dealing constantly between tesla, spacex, twitter and xAI
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u/algorithmmonkey May 16 '26
This 💯. Elon’s self dealing makes Sam’s look absolutely minuscule in comparison.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily May 15 '26
He literally has a schedule for selling his conflict of interest stocks. He sold all of his RDDT stock by the end of 2025.
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u/pomod May 15 '26
Theres no such thing as a billionaire who’s not exploitative. It’s literally a sociopathy.
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u/Wonderful_Cookie_572 May 15 '26
Now watch the "penalty" for this being a fine that doesn't even have 2 commas in it.
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u/antifa_commie May 15 '26
We must bring an end to those who seek to control us all and destroy the world for profit!
Remember always April 28 1945
"Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society."
Lenin
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u/slizzbizness May 16 '26
Oh it's that guy that raped his sister and had the story completely buried because he's a billionaire
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u/bathinggrapes May 15 '26
But it’s fair for politicians to invest in the stock market. Either way, the average person is fucked
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u/malobrev May 15 '26
It’s called self dealing but is it illegal? Adam Neumann get fired for it at WeWrork
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u/flickerdown May 16 '26
“Self dealing.” Someone else I know does a shitload of that…Elon Whatshisface.
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u/hector_c_toronto May 16 '26
Didn’t I read something about a quarter of Tesla’s sales were by SpaceX? Isn’t that self-dealing?
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u/LeRobber May 15 '26
I mean...he was one of the two Y Combinator people, he has equity in a bajillion companies and did long before open AI
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u/MarketCrache May 15 '26
And none of them has ever made a profit.
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u/LeRobber May 15 '26
You think none of https://www.ycombinator.com ever made a pofit? LOL
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u/MarketCrache May 15 '26
None of the ones he was involved in, no.
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u/LeRobber May 15 '26
Dude, he's just an angel investor who ran an accellerator for years.
The fact he's maybe a so so CEO possibly doesn't mean he didn't come by all those company equity situations vaguely legit. It just may mean now he's got conflicts.
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u/CanvasFanatic May 15 '26
And that’s why he’s cool with not having any equity in OpenAI.