Sam Altman's Opaque Investment Empire

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Daily News, Business News, News

4.2 • 5.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a day job and a side gig. Only one of them makes him rich. WSJ's Berber Jin explains how Altman makes most of his wealth through investing in tech startups and how some of those startups' business relationships with OpenAI raise questions about conflicts of interest. Further Reading: - The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI’s Sam Altman Rich Further Listening: - Artificial: The OpenAI Story - Tesla's Multibillion-Dollar Pay Package for Elon Musk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	founders of big tech companies usually make a lot of money.
0:10.0	People like Bill Gates, Jeff Baysos, Mark Zuckerberg, made billions of dollars from the businesses they helped start.
0:17.0	Elon Musk was recently granted a pay package at Tesla worth around $48 billion.
0:25.0	But Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of Open AI,
0:29.0	one of the hottest startups in the world?
0:32.0	$65,000.
0:35.0	That doesn't sound like a lot for a man running a company like this.
0:40.0	Yes, definitely not a lot of money for someone who runs the second most valuable US startup.
0:47.0	Huh, is that unusual?
0:50.0	It's extremely unusual.
0:52.0	Most startup founders are the largest owners of the
0:56.6	equity in their companies and a lot of their net worth is tied up to the companies
1:01.1	they run.
1:02.6	That's our colleague Berber Jin.
1:04.7	He says that even though Altman is paid a low salary,
1:07.8	it doesn't mean he isn't rich.
1:10.3	In fact, he's extremely wealthy, but not because of open AI, at least not directly.
1:17.0	Altman is an investor.
1:19.0	He's invested in more than 400 tech startups and controls at least 2.8 billion dollars of those
1:24.7	companies equity according to company filings and Wall Street Journal
1:28.2	reporting. And some of those companies have close business ties with open AI.
1:35.0	As open AI grows and its ambitions grow and companies want to work with open AI,
	...

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