Jeff Stein
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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So I think this has the potential to be one of the most dramatic federal interventions in the economy in modern American history.
The big mystery at the heart of this that I've been trying to figure out is why do OpenAI, does OpenAI, do Sam Altman, why do they want this?
And I'm curious for your guys' potential take on this.
But essentially what we revealed last week is that OpenAI has gone to the Trump administration and said, you know, we're moving forward with this potentially trillion dollar IPO to become sort of a public company.
What if the government stepped in and became one of the largest shareholders?
And not because the government would come in and buy shares, like if you or I wanted to go out and buy shares in OpenAI or Anthropic stock, that would be one thing.
What they're talking about here is having Sam Altman is proposing to the Trump administration, effectively ceding controls of his company to the government.
And that's the story we broke.
And we reported that the Trump administration is looking into this and thinking about it.
And then
Trump confirmed that they were doing that.
And so this is, you know, an unusual thing where you have the head of a major company saying to the US government, hey, would you guys like billions and billions of dollars worth of my private company?
I don't know about you guys, but I can't remember.
the head of any company ever saying to anyone, much less the government, like, what if you guys came in and made me billions of dollars poorer?
And it's such a head spinning thing.
And it raises, I think, a lot of questions about motivations, about money, about sort of the Trump administration's role in all of this.