I finally feel like I can see the essence of the business he’s been promoting.

When I read the 2016 *New Yorker* feature, I thought Sam Altman was just an executive at a tech company. He was the president of Y Combinator, and he had five sports cars, an escape bag, guns, potassium iodide, gas masks, and even land in California arranged. He was introduced as someone preparing for the end of the world.

A decade later, everything had changed completely. He became the person who most loudly warns about the end of the world—and at the same time the one who most actively pushes it forward. While claiming that AI will destroy humanity, he built a personal investment empire worth $2 billion. He calls for regulation while finding ways to get around it. This contradiction was not actually a contradiction. It was all a calculated business model.

The story of OpenAI is textbook-like. It creates fear. It says in a joint statement with scientists that the risks of AI are comparable to nuclear war. In Senate testimony, it says, “It’s healthy to feel fear about the potential of AI.” These remarks become top news. Free advertising.

Once fear takes hold, it sells the solution. Worldcoin. It claims it will distribute funds to people around the world through iris scans. The story is compelling, but swapping biometric data for money has triggered concern in multiple countries. Kenya, Spain, Brazil, India, Colombia, and others moved to halt it or launch investigations. However, this isn’t a problem for Altman. What matters is establishing himself as “the person who has the only solution.”

His use of regulation is clever. In his congressional testimony in May 2023, instead of pushing back against regulation like other top executives at tech companies, he personally asked, “Please regulate us.” He proposed introducing a licensing system. Since OpenAI was technically leading at the time, this high barrier to entry became the best defense against competitors. But when Google and Anthropic’s technology started to catch up and the open-source community began to rise, his position shifted slightly. Now he argues that overly strict regulation “disastrously” hinders innovation. When he has the advantage, he makes regulation his ally; when his advantage is threatened, he screams for freedom.

He’s putting forward a $7 trillion chip plan, trying to extend influence all the way to the very top of the industrial chain. This isn’t within the CEO’s job scope. It’s ambition to reshape the world’s underlying structure itself.

Once you look at OpenAI’s transformation, everything becomes clear. When it was founded in 2015, its mission was “to safely benefit all of humanity.” In 2019, it became a limited-profit subsidiary. In early 2024, the word “safely” was quietly removed from the mission statement. Meanwhile, revenue exploded from tens of millions of dollars in 2022 to more than $10 billion per year in 2024. Valuation jumped from $29 billion to the scale of a trillion-dollar company.

The incident in November 2023 was symbolic. Altman, who was removed by the board for “not being candid,” returned like a king just 5 days later. The CEO Brockman announced his resignation, and more than 700 employees used threats to pressure a move to Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Nadella openly sided with him. Nearly all of the board’s opposition faction was eliminated.

This is the classic pattern of charismatic leadership—the very concept of Weber. Followers believe in the leader not because he took the right actions, but because he is who he is. The “fate” that Altman symbolizes matters more than procedural justice from the board. The security team was dismantled right away. Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever stepped down. Security chief Jan Leike also resigned, tweeting that “for product releases, the security culture was sacrificed.”

Silicon Valley has become a factory that mass-produces these “prophets.” Musk is no exception. In 2014, while claiming that “AI is summoning demons,” Tesla became the world’s largest robot company. Then he launched xAI, and within a year its valuation exceeded $20 billion. Warnings about demons and the manufacture of demons happening at the same time.

Zuckerberg follows the same structure. After investing $90 billion into the metaverse and failing, he quickly pivoted to a “superintelligence lab.” A grand vision about humanity’s future, astronomical funding, and a savior-like stance.

Peter Thiel is a mentor. He invests in companies that tout “technological singularity” and “immortality,” while building underground doomsday bunkers in New Zealand. He obtained citizenship after only 12 days of staying there. Palantir is one of the world’s largest data surveillance companies for governments and the military. In an Iranian military operation in early 2026, Palantir’s AI platform functioned as the brain—integrating spy satellites, communications interception, drones, and data from the Claude model to identify targets.

They all warn that “the end is near” while “accelerating the end.” This isn’t a split personality—it has been validated as the most efficient business model in capital markets. It creates structural anxiety and then sells it. It wins attention, capital, and power.

Why does this tactic succeed every time? There are three steps.

First, don’t just create fear—manage the rhythm of fear. Decide who to scare, when to instill fear, and when to show hope. Everything is designed. Fear is fuel, and the timing and method of ignition are the technology.

Next, turn the inscrutability of technology into a source of authority. For most people, AI is a black box. When something arrives that is so complex that people can’t understand it, they instinctively hand over the right to explain it to “the person who understands it best.” The more you portray AI as increasingly mysterious and dangerous, the more indispensable they become. This logic is self-reinforcing. External doubts are invalidated as “not sufficiently understood.” In the end, only they have the qualification to evaluate themselves.

Finally, replace “profit” with “meaning.” What they sell isn’t just a product, but a story that carries meaning on a cosmic scale. You’re determining humanity’s fate. Once followers accept this story, they give up their ability to criticize. In the face of a mission involving “the survival of mankind,” doubting the leader’s motives makes you look small.

Altman had always claimed that he didn’t always hold OpenAI stock directly and only received a symbolic salary. However, Bloomberg’s 2024 calculations estimate his personal net worth at about $2 billion. The main source is investments in VC. Early investments in Stripe generated returns of hundreds of millions of dollars. Large profits came from Reddit’s IPO. There were also nuclear fusion investments in Helion. Immediately after that, OpenAI began negotiating a large-scale power procurement contract with Helion.

Even without directly holding OpenAI stock, he built a personal investment empire centered on OpenAI. Repeated sermons about the future of humanity keep injecting value into this empire.

A survival bag filled with guns, gold, antibiotics, and land you can fly to anytime—he never hid it. The escape kit is real, and his passion for the end is real too. But at the same time, he’s also the person most actively promoting the end. No contradiction. Because in his logic, there’s no need to stop the end—you just need to take a position first.

In February 2026, right after drawing a red line—“do not use AI in war”—he signed a contract with the Pentagon. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s a requirement embedded in his business model. A moral stance is part of the product. Commercial contracts are the source of profit. He has to play both a benevolent savior and a ruthless doomsday prophet at the same time. If he can’t fulfill both roles at once, his story can’t continue.

The real danger isn’t AI. It’s the people who believe they have the right to define humanity’s destiny. The business model they tout is built on a perfect understanding of human cognitive structure. It creates fear you can’t ignore, monopolizes your interpretation, and turns you into their most loyal evangelist through “meaning.” Silicon Valley is no longer a place that produces technology—it has become a factory for manufacturing modern myths.