Ronan Farrow
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And we'll have a big old foundation and we're going to do some charitable activity and that'll help.
Compared him to Hitler.
And David Sachs and –
Safety has fallen out of favor in Silicon Valley and Washington to a great extent.
And one of the things we document in this piece is Sam Altman's various transformations and his conflicting stances at various times also represent a wider sea change.
The moment of the blip when people in this industry were still— The coup attempt.
The coup attempt, the firing—
when people in the industry were still uncertain about whether you should treat executives who shape this transformative technology as just other executives and hold them to those normal standards, or whether this requires people with an elevated level of integrity because they hold our future in their hands, that was unsettled at the time in a way that really led to these events where you had a company that started as a nonprofit, was still to some extent a nonprofit, a bunch of people who joined
signing up for that mission, and they said, this guy is lying too much, and he has to go.
And it's... They call themselves a PBC, but we were told... What's a PBC?
A public benefit corporation.
But functionally, it is a for-profit institution, and what was once the main event, the non-profit, now has a 27%, 26%?
It has a minority stake.
The inflection point of the firing and the reason we look at it as an important one in this piece is a moment where that argument that we should have this elevated standard, the rubber met the road.
It was tested.
And what we see afterwards, him clawing his way back in this way,
partly on the strength of going to a bunch of investors.
As we document, we get inside of those rooms and we see how those conversations went and saying like, hey, these people just fired me for this, you know, vaporous thing.
Now, he was able to do that in part because I think that old board that fired him did not acquit themselves strategically in many ways, shall we say.