Sam Altman Returns to Political Fund-Raising | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman Returns to Political Fund-Raising

nytimes.com

Sam is liberal, but being a republican is better for business these days. He's more of a survivalist than anything else.

I really wish Sam stood by his convictions. He has the money to make a difference (see: Elon, although obviously Sam has less).

> Sam is liberal, but being a republican is better for business these days. He's more of a survivalist than anything else.

That's a lot of words to say he is a hypocrite.

Seems to be a recurring leadership theme in this new post-civil deglobalization reality.

Agreed. This wasn't a defense. I'd argue it's worse.

> but being a republican is better for business these days

Unless your business is directly impacted by tariffs being applied or reverted on a weekly basis.

Even then, easier to get an exception (or avoid tarrifs on your product) if you spent the money to sit behind him at his inauguration.

that's exactly when you want to pay your $5M fee to have a private session with Trump at Mar a lago, pledge fealty, and get your exception. then make sure you behave lest he changes his mind and has DOGE mess you up.

> lest he changes his mind and has DOGE mess you up

sounds like Don Corleone and Luca Brasi

To quote the The NSW police board's report, written around 1987 when Trump put in a bid to open Sydney's first casino:

"Atlantic City would be a dubious model for Sydney and in our judgement, the Trump mafia connections should exclude the Kern/Trump consortium"

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-31/trump-chinese-triads-...

>Unless your business is directly impacted by tariffs being applied or reverted on a weekly basis.

It's not like Democratic businesses are exempt from tariffs. Trump is handing out "exemptions" and you can bet he's being more generous with handing out those exemptions to his friends and/or money dispensers.

In case you haven't read the article (ex paywall here: https://archive.ph/LU7FT) he's raising money for a Democrat.

Yup! The context of why this is on HN is because he recently supported Trump, though, hence my comment.

Elon was liberal until he wasn't. Politics is like sports teams. It's an immutable identity for the poor. But for the wealthy they are open to purchase any team.

Exactly.

Perfectly said. I wish I could send it to my friend who is all consumed by the Faux and believe some billionaire is watching his back and about to send him some checks.

Hard to really say Elon was ever liberal, though. Rather, he was always opportunistic. And the hilarious saga of his gaming skills really calls into question all of his general decision making.

Which, fair, you can point to his giant bankroll. Hard to square that with his public persona over the years. Easy to say he has declined recently. But, I'm starting to question how long it was always there.

I can’t imagine he would have had enough free time to develop any “gaming skills” whatsoever past the PS1 generation.

Similarly, I can't imagine he has enough free time to do much of anything with how often he is tweeting nowadays.

Still, none of that stopped him from claiming this quite strongly. Which, it would be fine if this was offhand statements. Because, yeah, who cares? But it seems he has pushed this idea for many years, whenever he could. Not exactly the sign of a healthy person. :(

In retrospect, I think the warning signs were present at least as far back as the incident with harming the name of the person who told him that submarines aren't helpful during cave rescues.

Possibly even further back, given the fight with the Top Gear car review show: https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/remember-when-tesla-tried...

Those two incidents together definitely make a hypocrite out of Musk, even if he did win the lawsuit as defendant in the caving case.

Even before the submarine stunt, he called an entire field of nanotechnology BS. As a PhD researcher that was the moment I knew he cannot be trusted as authority on any matter related to science and engineering- not because he's an idiot, but because of his bias. Which is a very odd and difficult realization given his business involving renewable energy and space travel.

That's only true if you see politics as hewing to the two party paradigm. Sam Altman, Elon Musk et al., aren't liberals or conservatives, they're capitalists. Their ideological consistency, their only alignment, is to the growth of their individual wealth. That is and always has been their team.

That's an odd thing to say given that republicans just flipped working-class cities like Passaic, NJ that voted 74% for Clinton in 2016: https://nypost.com/2024/11/06/us-news/nj-dems-scratch-their-.... Net swing in Little Bangladesh, Queens, where some of my family lives was over 50 points from 2020.

When I was growing up in the 1990s, there were about as many conservative democrats as liberal ones: https://news.gallup.com/poll/467888/democrats-identification.... In just the last 20 years, the party has become much more liberal, which has pushed many Democrats into the GOP. At the same time, educated professionals have left the GOP and become Democrats. Political alignments are actually quite fluid.

> The Democrats in Congress have become 6.5% more liberal, while the Republicans have become 26.5% more conservative.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...

Elon does what is in Elons interest. It’s not about principles. It’s just about throwing immigrants under the buss so people don’t realize the amount of resources the rich have is increasing and that is the reason they have so little resources.

It’s not about any principle besides lining his pockets, even if it destabilizes the world and leads to people moving further in the direction of blaming the other.

This may create an environment where someone more extreme than both he and trump will flourish and that will be a nightmare the likes of which we do not want to know.

One envisions a new take on Seneca: "Politics is that which the commoners see as necessary, the wealthy see as optional, and the rulers see as useful."

The only conviction of these guys is money and power. They are not liberal or conservative, they go with whatever gives them an advantage at the time.

> The only conviction of these guys is money and power. They are not liberal or conservative, they go with whatever gives them an advantage at the time.

The parties, or the billionaires? (Or both?)

Because I've spent most of my adult life being mildly perplexed why the Democrats are called "liberal" when they're pretty conservative, and more recently the Republican party today is about as far from "conservative" as it's possible to get.

sam is a billionaire who supports some liberal causes sometimes. those causes are obviously far far less important to him that being a billionaire.

calling him a liberal as though that's any part of his identity at all seems wrong.

> as though that's any part of his identity

Quoting this for posterity, I did get a good laugh out of it. Should we say the same for Mr. Tim "Courage" Apple?

Libertarian taking government money and liberal are two different things. I doubt there's any liberals in Sam Altman circles. It's hard to even call people like Sam Altman libertarians when they have no regard for other people's intellectual property.

> Libertarian taking government money and liberal are two different things.

There are many different uses of “liberal” in discussing politics, and some of them (including those used by what there is of an American Left) completely include what in the US are often referred to as “libertarians”.

“Liberal” is quite possibly the most heavily overloaded political descriptor in existence.

It is so be cause of a sustained campaign to turn it into a slur.

No, that's not really the main reason. The main reason is that almost every modern Western political ideology is either a development from 18th Century liberalism [the more common case] or a reactionary response against it or some subset of its descendants [excluding the overlap, the less common case], and some are both descendants of 18th Century liberalism and reactions against other descendants.)

As a result, most ideologies in the West have some claim to the name “liberalism” and an even larger majority have deep seated opposition to one or more things with an association with that name.

I posit you can successfully be libertarian while disregarding the institution of intellectual property.

I, for one, think it's a deeply flawed way we look at it in our society today and this does not need to be so. There are many many ways we could have perceived and handled intellectual property. I see knowledge a common good that once it's out there, it's out there.

There's probably exceptions, but a part of me thinks that these "more-money-than-they-could-spend-in-ten-lifetimes" billionaires are all sociopaths, who have no true convictions outside of what enriches them. Their politics serve as glorified marketing in addition to the normal bribery that campaign contributions have always been.

I think it's a fallacy to think that they experience the same kind of emotions or convictions that you or I do. The Diablo cheater was left-leaning until he realized that it was more profitable to start getting a conservative audience.

I don't care if it is raising money for a democrat/republican/green/independent. The problem for a long time has been too much money in politics, but Citizens United made it worse, and the events of the most recent election should have made it transparent to everyone who was in denial that this is the case.

If I donate more than $2900 to a candidate I get in trouble. If I create a PAC, then I'm able to donate $290M dollars without issue. Yes, we still have one person/one vote, but voters who donate millions of dollars are the ones who get heard.

The candidate who spent more money lost, though.

Given the status of Russia interference in USA affairs, I think their expenses as well for the campaign can't not be counted

Yep you gotta include the Kremlin budget for destroying the world’s super power. Otherwise the comparison is simply not fair.

Well, you have to ignore the purchase and rather rapid weaponization of twitter?

Well you would have to ignore the weaponization of... every other social media platform and the majority of newspapers and news stations.

Not really comparable?

That is beside the point. The guy who spent the most is now running wild through the government, firing people without cause, sucking up information, installing software, reallocating money, and who knows what.

Your point seems to be: that is OK because Trump won.

Learning the word "kleptocracy" is but one of many benefits of my being a huge William Gibson fan.

Add gerontocracy to that.

Only a few of the real players in this are old, even if they're the original source of the money.

He's more of a predator if his sisters allegations are true.

Virginia has the most number of datacenters in the US, including major large datacenters for Meta/Google/AWS. Might be an angle for OpenAI to get some zoning passed.

Zoning in State/Local issue so fundraising for Federal Senator isn't going to help you with that. More likely Mark Warner is moderate Democrat AND very influential with DoD and Government Contractors. OpenAI needs revenue bad and selling some overpriced plans to the Government is great way to get hooked up to some easy cash flow.

Never made one of these, but I think this helps get around the paywall: https://archive.is/LU7FT

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