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Sam Altman Is Running Elizabeth Holmes’s Playbook but With a Thousand Times the Money and Consequences
We see the same pattern repeat itself as if no lessons were learned at all.
In 2023, OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman as CEO, officially stating that he had been “not consistently candid.” For anyone else, that would have been a devastating blow. But not for him.
Because Sam Altman is no ordinary man. Some people wonder whether he’s even human. As Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once put it,
You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.
A week after he was fired, Altman was back. And soon the board itself had been replaced.
To grasp what this episode really means for the AI industry, you need to know about another one that is strikingly similar. It happened in the “career” of Elizabeth Holmes, the former head of the infamous startup Theranos.
In the late 2000s, the Theranos board also came to the conclusion that its CEO couldn’t be trusted. One director (a former associate of Steve Jobs) started asking awkward questions about revenue projections. Then several of the company’s executives complained to the chairman about Holmes’s behavior…
