Sam Altman — the Stanford University dropout turned VC-backed tech billionaire — just can't catch a break.
Though the 39-year-old startup tycoon has multi-million dollar mansions in Hawaii, San Francisco, and Napa, the personal favor of president Donald Trump, and enough luxury cars to make an NBA player blush, he still comes short on the one thing money can't buy: respect.
After announcing a ChatGPT update that substantially upgrades the service's image-generating capabilities, Altman posted a semi-ironic status reflecting on the last ten years of his career. When you're Sam Altman, he claimed, "everyone hates you for everything," despite "grinding for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever."
It's a tough life for a guy worth about $1.2 billion, enough to give about 417,000 low-income kids healthcare for a year, or cover the rent for nearly 125,000 public housing units.
To make matters worse, fanboys are using his AI to sloppify his face into Studio Ghibli-style memes — probably ChatGPT's most useful feature so far. When you're Altman, he whines, you "wake up one day to hundreds of messages: 'look i made you into a twink Ghibli style haha [sic].'" Rough break, man.
It's not the first time the tech titan has blown off steam on social media. During a public spat with Elon Musk earlier this year, the ChatGPT CEO faced an onslaught of harassment from the world's richest man.
"Just one more mean tweet and then maybe you'll love yourself," Altman quipped at the time. He later got a little more personal, pining that "probably [Musk's] whole life is from a position of insecurity... I don't think he's a happy person."
Dueling egos notwithstanding, there's a certainly a glimmer of irony there. Whether it's enough to offset that gnawing feeling of dread the tycoon feels every day is another story.
Broadly speaking, the immense influence of powerful billionaires like Altman is a symptom of growing wealth inequality in the US. But when it comes to tech billionaires, it's evidently not enough to hoard money and influence like a feudal lord — they want to be worshipped, too.
As tech critic Stephen Moore puts it: "instead of disappearing to enjoy a quiet life sleeping on a mattress of $100 bills, they continue to force themselves into the limelight, desperate to keep themselves relevant, desperate to feel worshipped by the bootlickers... why can't they just make their money and f*ck off?"
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