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Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to believe that Sam doesn't have equity in OpenAI. It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

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There’s plenty of evidence that he has no equity. I’d love to see contradictory evidence, but without that, just refusing to believe things based on intuition isn’t great.

Why is that not great? It makes absolutely zero sense for him to have no equity, or at least some agreement in place that equity is coming. Or some other terms that essentially amount to equity. You don’t need evidence to be skeptical of the situation.

He was wealthy before and has other means to parlay openai to further wealth.

You’re doing the “only the true messiah would deny his divinity” argument — if he was going to profit, that’s bad. If he’s not going to profit, obviously he’s lying and is going to profit, so that’s bad.

IMO arguments are only meaningful if they can be falsified. Your argument can’t be falsified because you’re using a lack of evidence as proof.

When did he say profit was bad?

Why does it make zero sense? It makes perfect sense to me.

With no equity comes no control. I would find it very surprising he has no control over the project.

And if he does have control that has value whether you label it equity or not.

It is possible he literally has no control and no financial upside but who would turn down control over what they believed to be a world shaping technology?

I mean, most non-founder company CEOs don't have a significant % of total equity and they still have control over the company.

They have temporary control that can be taken away. Real control comes from owning more than half of the voting shares.

The parent is a non-profit, hence no equity is required to have control. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

What's the plenty of evidence? Everyone is basing this on a single news article which essentially said "we spoke to insiders who said he doesn't have any equity".

It's nothing special, there's a company under the foundation, he doesn't have share in the company, he's ceo and board member of the foundation.

It's just this one non-important detail is now being repeated over and over.

> It must be some 4D-chess-style ownership structure, which I'm guessing is for tax avoidance.

How would this even work? If only I got a dollar for someone suggesting that there are Magic ways to avoid tax…”they just write it off!”

Magic is just a word for things we don't understand. As a poor wage slave sap, I'm 100% sure the world is run by magic guilds, i.e. a bunch of powerful people conspiring stuff I could never fathom. Whatever gets to my eyes and ears has been approved for public disclosure. I don't know shit, everything is magic to me. I kinda know how to survive. So far.

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