Who is Sam Altman Anyway?

Sam Altman’s leadership style and professional history reveal a pattern of shifting personas tailored to specific audiences, ranging from a cautious, safety-focused researcher to a growth-oriented, competitive executive. Reporting by Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow highlights how these conflicting narratives—initially used to secure support for a non-profit, safety-first mission—have fueled internal distrust and eventual leadership turmoil at OpenAI. Documents from former colleagues, including Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amadei, suggest that Altman’s pursuit of power and perceived duplicity created an environment incompatible with the development of safe artificial general intelligence. While Altman characterizes these disputes as personality clashes, the accumulation of evidence points to a systemic strategy of telling stakeholders what they want to hear to maintain control. As OpenAI shifts toward aggressive, high-stakes fundraising to win the global race for AGI, the disconnect between its early altruistic rhetoric and current commercial reality continues to define the company’s trajectory.