Next thing you know, we're going to find out that his name isn't even Sam Altman, OpenAI isn't open, and all the workers have been replaced with robots a la Disney's Black Hole movie from the 1980s.
Paul Graham: "Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful."
Given this background, while I might normally take the comment that "We wanted to get started quickly and the easiest way to do that due to our structure was to put it in Sam's name" at face value, there has been enough past shenanigans that I don't buy that.
I know what you're talking about, and in my opinion that's a gross misrepresentation (that, unfortunately, I've often seen repeated). I think people can judge the actual statement on its own merits, from paulgraham.com/founders.html:
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
Sam even acknowledges past shenanigans.
2017: https://www.vox.com/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200-mi...
2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/01/reddit-eyeing-ipo-charge-mil...
2024: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/01/18/reddit-pl...
On the other hand, Wikipedia claims without source that AP has a 30% stake in Reddit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
https://fortune.com/2024/02/04/sam-altman-one-person-unicorn...?