OpenAI Co-Founder & CEO Sam Altman speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Sam Altman seems to have the Midas touch. As if it were not enough that he has a fortune already from his OpenAI company, Altman just made another $600 million from Reddit’s IPO. And Altman is also talking about how Elon Musk expected OpenAI to fail.
Reddit went public last week and Sam Altman, 28, has a 7.6% share in the social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website.
Founded in 2005, Reddit allows users to submit content like links, text posts, images, and videos. Other users then vote on this content, with submissions getting pushed higher on the site if they receive more upvotes than downvotes. This creates a constantly changing frontpage of content that reflects the interests of the Reddit community.
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Sam Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Series B funding round in 2014.
“I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use besides Facebook, Google, and Amazon—and reddit’s founders (Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) were in the first YC batch with me,” wrote Altman on his blog at the time. “I was probably in the first dozen people to use the site, and I shudder to imagine the number of hours I have spent there.”
Reddit is an example of something that started out looking like a silly toy for wasting time and has become something very interesting,” he added. “It’s been an important community for me over the years—I can find like-minded people that I can’t always find in the real world.”
Meanwhile, Sam Altman claimed that Tesla founder Elon Musk never thought that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, would succeed. And yet Musk is suing the company for breach of contract charging that the company has failed to live up to its found principle of working, “for the benefit of humanity broadly.” It is not clear how he expected a company that would fail to do so.
Altman told podcaster Lex Fridman “Musk thought OpenAI was going to fail. He wanted total control to turn it around. We wanted to keep going in the direction that now has become OpenAI. He also wanted Tesla to be able to build an AGI effort.”
“At various times, he wanted to make OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could have control of or have it merge with Tesla. We didn’t want to do that, and he decided to leave, which is fine,” added Sam Altman about Elon Musk.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
Sam Altman has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and one of the “Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology” by Businessweek. He is also the founder of the Long Term Future Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in companies working to solve long-term problems like climate change and pandemics.
