This is a long, sweeping, and fun analysis of Altman's character. I didn't know, but extrapolated the picture the article paints from watching an interview with a YC partner long before ChatGPT. The interviewer asks "who is the most ambitious person you know?" The partner replies, in a tone implying he didn't mean it in a good way, "Sam Altman."

That directly lines up with some of the funny business from his YC departure:

Altman has maintained over the years, both in public and in recent depositions, that he was never fired from Y.C., and he told us that he did not resist leaving. Graham has tweeted that “we didn’t want him to leave, just to choose” between Y.C. and OpenAI. In a statement, Graham told us, “We didn’t have the legal power to fire anyone. All we could do was apply moral pressure.” In private, though, he has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners’ mistrust. This account of Altman’s time at Y Combinator is based on discussions with several Y.C. founders and partners, in addition to contemporaneous materials, all of which indicate that the parting was not entirely mutual. On one occasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, “Sam had been lying to us all the time.”

I know many bitcoiners are fans of Aaron Swartz. He also viewed Altman with suspicion:

One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”

There's a lot more hate porn in here for those in the mood.

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260406113443/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted