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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Online. The tech industry has craved a messiah since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

But in Open AI's CEO, Sam Altman, I think they've discovered more of a false profit.

A.C. Little Grifter that uses his remarkable ability to impress and manipulate people,

specifically in Silicon Valley, to mask a total lack of technical and business acumen.

I realize this sounds a little dramatic and definitely a little inflammatory, but the air

around Sam Orton has for years been that he's somehow a magical special creature, a man who, and I quote,

is wise beyond his years and was so at the tender age of 19, and who, to quote, start-up incubator

white combinator's Paul Graham, could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come

back in five years and be king. In the next two episodes, I'm going to dig into Sam Altman's really specious success story,

and it's one that was built on the back of being in the right place at the right time,

definitely dodging accountability and responsibility in basically every job he's ever had,

including, by the way, the two that he was

fired from and the failed startup he had. And I believe he's used his political power as leverage

to scare away anyone who's going to ask any nasty questions or, of course, dare to stand against

him. In a stunning in-depth piece by Ellen Hewitt of Bloomberg, Sam Altman is repeatedly framed by his contemporaries as some sort of genius.

Without anyone ever asking why or explaining why, other than there's this vague sense of intellectual and philosophical superiority.

With Y Combinator founder John Coogan claiming that Altman had,

and I quote, an uncanny ability to listen intently and diagnose problems, and that he was,

and this is a real quote, I'm not kidding, the Michael Jordan of listening.

Sit with that for a moment, just sit with that.

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