So why does Altman seem so upset here? After all, this interviewer was just pointing out a basic fact that OpenAI has committed to spend over $1 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next eight years, despite only bringing in around $13 billion a year in recurring revenue, less than 1% of what they're promising to spend. I'm no money genius- and I'm personally terrible at budgeting-but that doesn't seem great.
Most of the supposed growth in the American economy in 2025 was caused by investment in AI. That's all part of a promise being made by the industry, led by Sam Altman, that once a certain level of machine learning intelligence is reached, all of our problems will be solved. The housing crisis, cancer, poverty, climate change mental health, democracy, universal basic income care, a bunch of diseases, this cancer and that one, and heart disease helping you try to accomplish your goals and be your best.
Very high quality health care. The important new scientific discoveries the marginal cost of energy are going to trend rapidly toward zero. The more equal world universal extreme health for everybody.
In exchange for all that Altman is asking all of society to put all of our eggs-our data, our economy, our water and resources. . .
everything-into one basket: his. He's offering us one, massive, So, should we trust Altman? Should we accept his deal?
Is it even our choice? Altman isn't a technologist or scientist, He's an investor and dealmaker and really good at it. .
. supposedly. But his whole career is a series of 'just trust me, bro' moments.
So let's examine the deal Altman is offering all of us. Should we believe Sam Altman's promises? And what's the cost to the rest of us if those promises turn out to be.
. . lies?
So let's go back and look closer at Altman's early days in the tech industry. Altman's first big deal was selling his first company, Loopt a service for locating your friends. That's something that inherently needs lots of users to work, or else you're just locating yourself.
The operative idea seems to be ubiquity. I mean, get get it out there in more ways than you can possibly imagine. This whole time, Loopt refused to say how many users they had.
Altman just insisted there were "way more users" than any other similar service. It turns out, though, that towards the end, Loopt only had 500 users. When Reuters reported this, Altman insisted it was "100 times" more than that and that he'd provide evidence.
. . He never did.
Just trust me, bro. Loopt sold to the Green Dot Corporation, who shut it down immediately and never used any of the tech. Green Dot investors allege it was a dirty deal done to enrich Sequoia Capital, a VC firm with a stake in Loopt and two board members at Green Dot who helped approve the deal.
Altman left Green Dot as soon as he was legally able, walking away with millions for building an app that no longer existed in any form. And luckily for Altman, someone saw something in him. Peter Thiel.
Thiel, who once said that Altman should be treated as "more of a messiah figure" gave Altman millions to start his own VC firm, Hydrazine Capital. And that's not all the capital Altman controlled. He was also hired as president of Y Combinator, or YC, an influential venture capital firm and startup incubator, where Loopt got its original funding.
"I think the president of YC is sort of the unofficial leader of the startup movement. " And Altman personally traded on that influence. The New Yorker reports that up to 75% of Hydrazine Capital was invested in YC companies.
Altman used his inside view to get a cut of YC's power. Despite Altman promising he didn't cross invest in YC companies. That's two big lies so far: the user base of LOOPT that needed users to exist, and his investments.
In 2015, Altman leads YC into the investment you likely most know him for: "Sort of a semi-company, semi-nonprofit, doing AI safety research. " OpenAI was launched as the supposed nonprofit OpenAI Foundation with a charter with a lot of lofty goals, "a primary fiduciary duty to humanity" and "avoiding enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power," while acting to "minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders. " The evidence that they'd do that?
"Just trust me, bro. " OpenAI's primary financial backers were tech billionaires and millionaires like Altman himself, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk, and tech companies like Amazon Web Services and Infosys. We wanted to build this with humanity’s best interest at heart.
But in exchange, OpenAI is asking for a lot. . .
Putting all of society's eggs in one basket, if you will. They want electricity, water, infrastructure. .
. Capital. .
. Your data. .
. Your writing. .
. Your art. .
. And for humanity to adjust to job loss, deepfakes and everything else. All in exchange for some future promise of technology that fixes everything.
So, can we trust him with all of this? Let's look at some of his biggest statements and promises to show how they tie to all the eggs in the basket. Altman insists he doesn't own any of OpenAI and he barely takes a salary.
I’m paid enough for health insurance. I have no equity in OpenAI. I'm doing this because I love it.
But he doesn't hide that he's already rich trying to do a rich-guy-using money-for-good Batman thing. That Batman. Such a wonderful person.
I don't deserve it. But we millionaires decided that you do. But let's look at how this is part of his honesty problem.
And it ties in to the eggs in the basket, because Altman is invested in all the stuff necessary to build OpenAI. One of the eggs OpenAI needs is a ton of data: you can't build a large language model without examples of language and content, and one source of that data is Reddit. Altman owns a big share of the social networking site and was on its board until 2022.
Reddit got its start in the same inaugural Y Combinator class as Loopt. Here's Altman standing next to Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz in 2005. Swartz died by suicide in 2013 after being criminally charged for reproducing academic articles online and breaking copyright law.
In 2015. , Altman made a deal with Reddit, allowing OpenAI to "basically aggressively scrape everything posted on the site" to feed into OpenAI's tech. Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian "felt in his bones" the deal was wrong.
It's a less noble version of what Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was targeted by law enforcement for. Swartz wanted to open the knowledge up to everyone. Altman wanted to put it in his product.
In 2014, Altman promised that he and other investors would give 10% of Reddit's value back to the Reddit community. That never happened, due to "regulatory issues. " But just like Reddit's data going to OpenAI, a look at the areas Altman's wealth is invested in show a deep connection to other needs of the organization.
He's invested in AI networking equipment companies, thermal battery companies, and even companies mining the rare earth metals that server farms require. And once it's all built, Altman will profit off the problems AI creates. We're going to focus on three: Rising energy demands and costs.
Misuse like fraud and deep fakes. And job loss and economic collapse. Altman says again and again that OpenAI needs more power.
The, "audacious long term goal is to build 250GW of capacity by 2033. " That much compute will require as much electricity as 1. 5 billion people, the equivalent of the entire population of India.
But Altman has a solution: since they first met in the early 2000s, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman have had a shared interest investing in nuclear power, which isn't inherently bad. Of course, nuclear can be an extremely efficient and clean form of energy, but Thiel and Altman want to own it. Altman is invested in Helion and Oklo.
Helion is working to build the first ever nuclear fusion power plant, a type of energy creation that many scientists say won't work and Oklo is building microreactors, literally truck sized nuclear reactors, which is a bit concerning considering this investment strategy. "Part of our model is make the cost of mistakes really low, and then make a lot of mistakes. " But for now, Oklo hasn't figured their reactors out yet, and they're just using gas to keep up the promises they made.
Nuclear startup Oklo and natural gas firm Liberty Energy today announcing a partnership to provide energy to large scale customers. Altman is also invested in multiple companies offering protection against AI bad actors, identity verification to prevent deep fakes, and even companies offering insurance for losses due to AI scams and hacking. That's like Batman not making any money off of crimefighting, but then selling "Batmobile drove into my house" insurance while also running the Uber for henchman startup that The Riddler uses, and selling The Joker white makeup.
One other big promise Altman makes is that when the AI he sees as inevitable makes many jobs obsolete, it'll create so much wealth that it can be shared with everyone. just like his smaller scale Reddit promise that turned out to be bullshit. And in 2024, he announced the product that would supposedly offer that shared abundance.
Worldcoin. Worldcoin is a technology company and cryptocurrency funded by all the usual suspects of techno fascism. Worldcoin's backers say it can be a way to give out some form of universal basic income.
When AI starts replacing jobs, I think this idea that we have a global currency that is outside of the control of any government is a super logical and important step on the tech tree. But it also sells itself as a solution to identity verification problems created by AI. They want to use these orbs as a method of trusted identity check, and you don't get your universal basic income until you scan your eyes into the orb and like many of Altman's other projects, from Loopt to ChatGPT it requires universal adoption to be of any business use.
A currency and identification system are pretty useless if other people don't use them. So again, Altman is making an offer. Give us your identity and we'll give you cryptocurrency.
It's a classic Altman deal. I'll fix everything if you sign over everything. Just trust me, bro.
It's almost like Altman wants to build a whole other economy. Just in case the one we have now falls apart. Which, well, we'll get to that.
In 2019, OpenAI gave up any pretense of being nonprofit and started a for-profit branch, then spun the for-profit out into its own entity in 2024. That for-profit organization has none of the same legal responsibilities as the nonprofit did, and brought in new investors like Microsoft, which invested $13 billion, which OpenAI largely spent on Microsoft products. And it's not just Microsoft, Nvidia has promised invest 100 billion in OpenAI over the next few years, money that OpenAI will spend buying Nvidia chips.
OpenAI has similar circular deals with AMD, the Qatari government, and Larry Ellison's Oracle. How about the 20 bucks you owe me? Well, I only got ten, so here's ten and I owe you ten.
Hey, Moe, you owe me 20. Well, here's ten, I’ll owe you ten. You owe me 20.
Here's ten, I’ll owe you ten. Here’s the ten I owe you. Good.
Now we're all even. The entire economy is tied to the success of Altman's project. "We might screw it up, like this is the bet that we're making and we're taking a risk along with that.
" who is the we taking the bet? Here's OpenAI's CFO Banks, private equity, maybe even, governmental, the ways governments can come to bear meaning like a federal subsidy or, meaning like just first of all, the, the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen. Through all of that stammering, the CFO of OpenAI is making a clear point: The government, your tax dollars, are responsible for saving the AI project.
That's more eggs in the basket. And that basket is based on the promises of Sam Altman, who as we've illustrated, lies and breaks promises a lot. So if we really look at the basket, maybe we shouldn't have been putting all those eggs in there.
And it gets worse. While we were editing this video, news broke that OpenAI is seeking a $750 billion valuation and is in talks with Amazon for a $10 billion investment. That's money that OpenAI would spend on Amazon infrastructure.
So I'm going to need more eggs.
