Whoops, The Tech Press Mythologized Another Unethical Asshole

It's so weird that this keeps happening.

But it appears that the U.S. tech press has once again spent years mythologizing a compulsive liar and rank opportunist who hides his self-serving financial interests behind stale sci-fi tropes and bullshit while endlessly failing upward.

That's the takeaway from this New Yorker piece on Stanford dropout turned OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Based on comments by 100 different associates, the story paints the picture of a man with no moral compass who will tell you whatever you want to hear provided he gets what he wants (control and lots of money).

The word "sociopath" appears several times in the piece, including in this quote from an OpenAI board member:

“He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

The sentiment is repeated here by a Microsoft executive:

“I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”

There are ample parallels with Elon Musk, who also spent years being heralded as a technological savant despite mounting evidence that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about half the time:

Altman is not a technical savant—according to many in his orbit, he lacks extensive expertise in coding or machine learning. Multiple engineers recalled him misusing or confusing basic technical terms. He built OpenAI, in large part, by harnessing other people’s money and technical talent.

If you're unfamiliar, OpenAI was originally constructed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a socially-conscious non-profit to ensure (or to pretend to ensure) that the evolution of "AI" would be ethically responsible. That is, as we're all now aware, not working out that great on a variety of different fronts.

That was in 2015; back before Elon Musk fully outed himself as a conspiratorial white supremacist sociopath with a head full of authoritarian butterscotch. Back before Trump kakistocracy took root and gave America's affluent tech execs permission to stop pretending they cared about human beings or democracy.

So over time, any meaningful public interest guardrails at OpenAI steadily dissolved, recently cultimating in the company becoming one of the Trump Pentagon's top automation partners (don't worry, Altman and Trump pinky swear they're not doing anything nefarious in a country with zero working regulatory guardrails or operational transparency into mass surveillance.)

The original nonprofit OpenAI board attempted to fire Altman in 2023, warning that he was a compulsive liar, with extensive undisclosed financial conflicts of interests, who should "not have his finger on the button."

At the time, a large chunk of the tech industry (and by extension most tech access journalists) treated all of these board members like hyperbolic cranks, even though several of them were not only reputable, but later proven extremely correct. From a Gary Marcus post in 2024:

I’ve written here before about Altman and his apparent lies, and why I thought the (nonprofit!) board was right to call him out, and occasionally about how Kara Swisher blocked me on X for saying that. (Her view was that Sam was basically innocent and the board was cloddish, writing “A clod of a board stays consistent to its cloddery”—and that they had no legitimate reason to question Sam’s candor.) Every bit of evidence that came out since has seemed to support my take and undermine Kara’s.

With access journalism as cover, it would only take days for Altman to turn the tables, regain his job as CEO, fire the entire board, and install a new one dedicated to letting him undermine nearly all of his previously stated ethical values.

You know, as one does.

Like Elon Musk, Sam Altman is the direct byproduct of "CEO said a thing!" journalism.

Like Musk, Altman has benefited greatly from a U.S. tech press pathologically obsessed with mythologizing terrible white men with a lot of money. Like Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg, Altman has spent much of the last decade being treated like some kind of sage philosopher/sociologist/guru hybrid by the corporate media simply because he has wealth and lies a lot.

Like Musk, you'll almost never hear about the technical achievements of any actual programmer or engineer at OpenAI (because how tech actually works isn't of interest to bankers). Like Musk, Altman alone takes singular credit for the entire company's achievements, endlessly basking in the press attention as a purported boy genius who is, alone, transforming the entirety of human civilization.

But, also like Musk, if you actually stop and listen to the words coming out of Altman's mouth, you'll notice a certain unremarkable dullness; dozens of stale sci-fi tropes cobbled together in an attempt to sound uniquely intelligent. If you have ethics and intuition, it's obvious. If your interest is in wealth accumulation, blind worship at the altar of tech innovation, or having access to the rich and powerful, you're inclined to respond with enthusiastic applause to everything he tells you.

Both Musk and Altman are bullshitters. Their skillset doesn't involve actual engineering innovation. It doesn't involve good management or ethical leadership.

It involves selling people on the idea that we're a few billion dollars (in their pocket) away from Mars colonization, or supercomputer sentience, or a new, near-mystical tomorrow full of unbridled public interest innovation.

The problem, repeatedly, is that while some of the tech (they personally don't actually build) functions, most of the surrounding longer-term CEO promises are bullshit. OpenAI is burning cash at an alarming rate. People aren't really paying for AI subscriptions at the scale needed to justify gargantuan investment in data centers and graphics cards. There are some very ugly problems on the horizon.

Theses men are not actually good at sustainable business, they're good at mass manipulation. They're good at telling a certain type of person what they want to hear. Eventually, reality interjects and the check will come due for all of them.

OpenAI is extremely likely to be among the first casualties of this looming AI hype bubble, and contrary to the claims of Altman and others, the technology is absolutely nowhere close to human-level sentience (ChatGPT recently went viral on TikTok for its inability to tell how long a run took).

All of this is downplayed or ignored in most news coverage of OpenAI's looming, and quite absurd, "trillion dollar" IPO. But, quite intentionally, America lacks a functional press capable of consistently conveying the truth about any of this to the public. Instead, we have ad-engagement based corporatism pretending to be real journalism, utterly dedicated to blowing smoke up the ass of wealth and power.

This results in a sort of pseudo-intellectual cack I affectionately call "CEO said a thing!" journalism. This form of journalism simply repeats every single claim a CEO makes without context, correction, or expert analysis illuminating whether anything being said is true.

It's pure stenography to be gobbled up by a culture obsessed with artifice and money. It's not quite as comically exaggerated as it was with Musk, but the underlying media mechanism is the same. And because Sam Altman historically talks a lot, constantly, about everything, his predictions are broadly unavoidable:

You'll note that in public comments, Altman is somehow never personally responsible for what's happening. He's always somehow distantly outside the window of responsibility for the things he and his company are actively doing (like creating a chatbot without proper suicidal ideation guardrails):

Altman routinely talks out of both sides of his mouth. Like many tech titans he advocates for AI regulations, but only if his lawyers write them. He fear-mongers about the false threat of Skynet-esque AI sentience to drive press attention and product sales, then endlessly undermines any actual ethical guardrails.

Like so many other U.S. tech "leaders," Altman also opportunistically and enthusiastically pivoted to support Trump, despite all of the bigotry, racism, ignorance, calls for violence, and unsubtle corruption:

After Trump won, Altman donated a million dollars to his inaugural fund, then took selfies with the influencers Jake and Logan Paul at the Inauguration. On X, in his standard lowercase style, Altman wrote, “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking . . . ).”

The New Yorker article framing Altman as a dodgy, self-serving opportunist dropped simultaneously with a new OpenAI faux-humanist missive claiming the company supports all manner of public interest protections, like universal basic income and equitable tax reform.

But, much like the original nonprofit mission of OpenAI, there's obviously no reason to think any of this will actually be realized. Altman, like most modern tech execs, tells people what they want to hear. And a tech press primarily fixated on propping up the interests of the extraction class dutifully repeats the message.

The New Yorker's allegations aren't new. There have been very clear warnings then about who Altman was for years. Helen Toner, one former board member who helped briefly fire Altman in late 2023, was not in any way subtle about the fact that Altman isn't trustworthy years earlier:

“The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the company’s public good mission was primary, was coming first — over profits, investor interests, and other things. But for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board."

It was always clear Altman was a manipulator, whose standards and ethics are entirely malleable constructs. The warnings were everywhere, constantly, for anybody with beyond mud-puddle grade intuition. They extend back to every company he's ever failed up from. "We" just decided to ignore it.

More specifically, the tech press downplayed or ignored it, because their primary purpose (with scattered and refreshing exception) is to help prop up the narratives the extraction class swaddle themselves in as they pursue their singular true interest: completely unhindered wealth accumulation.

I suspect this ends with OpenAI imploding during the looming AI bubble, the company being bought for scraps by Google or Microsoft, and Altman using his massive cash payout to stumble from one failed startup to another to widespread tech press acclaim; each and every past failure utterly memory holed.

When the whole thing goes tits up, as they did with Musk, most access-tech journalists will immediately pivot to insisting they saw this whole thing coming the whole time and played no role in the gruesome charade. There will be some light tutscolding before they quickly pivot to mythologizing the next bullshitter.

You'd think, at some point, we might want to have a serious adult conversation about why it's so easy for these ethically-hollow bullshitters to obtain such prominence in the tech industry, or why the tech press is so deeply invested in propping up the innovation mythologies if inherently terrible, unethical people.

But having that conversation requires disentangling media from corporate power and ad engagement; a conversation America's clearly not capable of having just yet, if ever.