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Comment by tomthe | Hacker News Reader

I would love to play some board games with Sam Altman. He is smart, strategic and very persuasive (I heard). He would excel especially at games like Risk or Mafia, where you have to persuade your opponents to collaborate with you.

But after a few rounds, no one would help him anymore and he would loose all the games.

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No wonder they get along with Microsoft just fine. Here's what Tim O'Reilly said about MSFT years ago, and I think it applies to OpenAI today:

"Microsoft gets a lot of heat for not leaving enough on the table for others. My mother, who’s English, and quite a character, once said of Bill Gates, “He sounds like someone who would come to your house for dinner and say, ‘Thank you. I think I’ll have all the mashed potatoes.’”"

Replace Gates with Altman.

source: https://daringfireball.net/2013/05/all_the_mashed_potatoes (the original post is gone from the O'Reilly website)

He seems to be winning all the games in real life

Not all (look up how he got fired from ycombinator). But as long as there are enough new people who want to play with him, he might do fine (and there are a lot of willing VCs). Once the word starts to spread about him, through stories like this, he might experience some backslash.

Sam wasn't fired for doing a bad job at YC, he was fired because the compensation structure wasn't something he was happy with, which is why he was also "double dipping" with his own funds into startups - something that was common at the time across the whole org. Jessica Livingston even went on to put money into his next project (OpenAI) which is also counter to the characterization in your perspective. He has tons of friends in high places that continue to put a lot of their money into Sam's coffers, because Sam is really good at making money for himself and others

Sorry, you are right and I stand corrected. I must have misremembered this. Here is a tweet from PG correcting this: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40521657

I originally got this sentiment partly from this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38378216

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