OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he's 'politically homeless' in July 4 post bashing Democrats

[highplainsdem]

Source: CNBC

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Friday, saying he finds himself “politically homeless” as the Democratic party is no longer aligned with encouraging a “culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

-snip-

“We should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism,” he wrote. “One doesn’t work without the other; you cannot raise the floor and not also raise the ceiling for very long.”

Altman, 40, said he’s believed this ideology since he was 20, and that Democrats were aligned with it then but have since lost the plot and have completely “moved somewhere else at this point.”

“I’d rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires,” Altman wrote.

-snip-



Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/04/openai-altman-july-4-zohran-mamdani.html

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I'd like to hear Sam explain how he and his fellow AI bros - and the venture capitalists keeping them afloat - plan to "widely distribute" their wealth.

Anyway, he's apparently reacting to what Mamdani said - that he doesn't think billionaires should exist.

[DBoon]

1. He should try being "really homeless" for a while

you know, sleeping on the streets, having people look at him with disgust and contempt, gettiing rousted by police.

Maybe this billionaire needs to learn some humility.

[ananda]

3. Yeah, we have particularly clueless billionaires...

when it comes to living in a world with people
who are not billionaires... however,

sometimes I think it's deliberate since, really,
most of them are filthy, greedy sociopaths.

[Hey Joe]

29. Did we not already learn this lesson?

More trickle down economics bullshit Sam ?
Really? The rising tide of wealth will raise all boats?
This was found to be nonsense in the Raygun era, when you were three. Do they never give up on their fever dreams?

[SheltieLover]

2. He should just stfu.

[speak easy]

4. Some senior Dem (or two) should get in touch with Sam.

[UpInArms]

5. Hey Sam

Take your artificial concern for the human race and fuck yourself with a chainsaw

[patphil]

6. These guys don't ever share the "compounding magic of capitalism".

They are all in on raising the ceiling without raising the floor.
The "plot" he's referring to has always been to make himself rich at the expense of everyone else.
There is no way that the great masses of people can ever have what the billionaires have. What he's saying is that somehow, although the top 5% has over 90% of the wealth, we can magically achieve that same level.
As if he would ever actually want us to, or allow us to do so.

Ever since the Supreme Court decision for Citizens United (as if that was really what it was about), the billionaires have been busy buying the government so the 5% could take political power away from the 95%.
They have now succeeded, and have no intention of allowing us back in.

That's why Trump eliminated the Department of Education, and is threatening all the Universities that teach things he doesn't like.

[PortTack]

7. Awhhh..let's make this poor fool feel really homeless...I'll start ...feel free to move out of the US!

[angrychair]

8. Cool... billionaire stuff

“I’d rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires,”

This is the most bullshit statement I've heard all day.
If everyone were a billionaire then an apple would cost $50 million dollars. It also means some serious hyperinflation.

Billionaires are a cancer on society. Each individual billionaire could crash the stock market with a single irrational trade or irresponsible comment. Billionaires are an incredibly destabilizing force on our economy and on society.
Not only should none of the current billionaires exist, it should be illegal to be a billionaire.

I think people defend them, even here, because it's hard to imagine what a single billion dollars looks like, much less hundreds of billions of dollars.

Its a hard thing to wrap your mind around. Let's try a comparative analog. Let's say that 1 dollar is equal to one second.

How long is a million seconds? 12 days.
How long is a billion seconds? 31 years.
How long is a trillion seconds? 31, 688 years.

See? Its a lot to wrap your mind around. I believe the time analogy really can cause sudden and violent nausea at the sudden realization about how "gross accumulation of wealth" is a wholly inadequate way to describe it.

[PatSeg]

9. Sounds awfully defensive to me

Does he have a clue what we are up against right now? Fighting unfettered fascism takes a high priority over a “culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

We are struggling to save democracy, there will be time enough for innovation later. Under a dictatorship, there won't be any significant innovation or entrepreneurship.

[SunSeeker]

10. Not taxing billionaires is what is starving innovation.

Just so we can give these asshats the tax breaks they don't need, we are slashing NIH, research and school funding. That's where innovation begins. Now we are having scientists flee our country. Go fuck yourself, Altman.

[Martin68]

11. Blaming Democrats for valuing compassion above greed. Totally clueless rich boy crying about how mean Democrats are.

[lostnfound]

12. Billionaires should exist -- but when you reach $1 B, a public party to celebrate, but no more wealth accumulation

When you reach $1 B, a front page article about exactly how you achieved your success, detailing EVERYTHING in the way of your value added, but also government contracts, employee salaries, environmental impact, what you started with (inheritance), how you attained your education, etc.

A real, honest profile that says “Hey, you brought good things to life”, your employees are better off, the society is better off… you’re a great guy for achieving the American dream..!
And after that, you have to figure out other motivations than wealth, because $1 B is the maximum any individual can control.

Tell me the current system isn’t more flawed than the one I’m proposing.

[LauraInLA]

13. My husband says that during the Biden administration Congress ended the r&d tax exemption in 2022, which

has resulted in a lot of job losses and damage to tech companies’ innovation. Please don’t shoot the messenger [ducking].

[highplainsdem]

14. Not true. Those layoffs were a result of what Trump did in 2017. Info below. Make sure your husband sees it.

https://gizmodo.com/massive-tech-layoffs-may-be-the-fault-of-a-2017-trump-tax-cut-2000613312

The good times in Silicon Valley are over—at least as far as the current generation of coders is concerned. The software industry is shrinking and, since 2023, the tech industry has been hemorrhaging jobs at an astounding rate. Workers who would’ve been secure several years ago are now out on their asses. While the reasons for this are diverse (AI is often discussed as a potential culprit and the overall economy has had its ups and downs over the past several years), one potential driver could also be the tax cuts that Trump passed in 2017.

The good times in Silicon Valley are over—at least as far as the current generation of coders is concerned. The software industry is shrinking and, since 2023, the tech industry has been hemorrhaging jobs at an astounding rate. Workers who would’ve been secure several years ago are now out on their asses. While the reasons for this are diverse (AI is often discussed as a potential culprit and the overall economy has had its ups and downs over the past several years), one potential driver could also be the tax cuts that Trump passed in 2017.

It turns out that a little-known provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 altered a longstanding loophole, known as Section 174, that allowed the tech industry to offload the cost of its research and development operations onto the federal government. Prior to the TCJA, tech companies could deduct 100 percent of the costs of R&D, allowing tech businesses the freedom to commit significant resources towards innovation. Bloomberg reports that, as Congress sought to find a way to offset the cost of giving big tax cuts to billionaires, one place where they discovered fat to trim was the tech industry’s R&D funding.

2017’s bill shifted the deduction from a full write-off to funding that would have to be parsed out over a period of several years. The provision that pared back the funding did not kick in until 2022, however. Not long after it went into effect, the tech industry began shedding jobs like nobody’s business.

-snip-

More at the link.

To find that, I googled

biden r&d tax exemption

and on the first page of results saw this

https://www.eisneramper.com/insights/blogs/tax-blog/r-d-tax-credit-tax-blog-0523/

and after skimming that googled

silicon valley section 174

and the third result on the page was the Gizmodo article above.

Trump likes to push nastier effects of his legislative agenda into the future, so he's more likely to get away with them.

[LauraInLA]

20. Thank you for this -- my husband says that this was what he was talking about, as Congress in 2022 was supposed to

do away with this poison pill and chose not to.

[highplainsdem]

22. And he blames the Democrats for a problem Trump created?

[LauraInLA]

24. I think he blames both Trump/Republicans for starting it and Dems for not cancelling it. This came up because we were

discussing reasons why tech has turned against Dems.

[lapfog_1]

28. the "tech bro billionaires" are not monolithic

There are a number of them ( I think all male ) that are autocratic libertarians... Peter Thiel, Eloon, Sam Altman, etc and include some of the Sand Hill Road billionaires like Marc Andreessen ( created Netscape, Mosaic - first web browsers ).

These are truly evil people... all of them. They believe that they are geniuses and rest of us are useless peons. Most built their fortunes on the efforts of other people AND government funded university research grants. Paypal ( Thiel and Eloon ) would never have been built except for nearly unbreakable secure communications between computers ( starting with RSA encryption that people like me worked on in college in the 1970s... on a government sponsored research grant ).

Then you have the old line tech billionaires... Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs ( his heirs ), etc.

They are a mixed bag of people with different philosophies. When Bill Gates was running M$, he did everything he could to create a near monopoly business, shitting out crappy software that, over time, became better and better... but always tied in with the rest of M$ software. Now that he is "retired" and a philanthropist, I think he expects to gain entry into heaven by giving his money away to various causes ( immunization in Africa, tech innovations in nuclear energy, systems to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, etc ). Larry Ellison... still a rich asshole AFAIK.

Then there are quite a large number of "quiet tech billionaires" like Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). 10th richest person in the world, not know for either right wing or left wing politics ( or politics of any kind ). We will see what happens to him and others in the same boat.

BTW, not to defend multi-billionaires... but these people are billionaires on paper, not like they have billions in either banks or gold deposits or whatever. If they sell the stock that makes them "billionaires" the value of that stock would plunge... netting them a fraction of what the current value is. So taxing the wealth of these people will a) wreck the stock market ( thus causing a deep recession for all of us ) and b) not net the government nearly as much as the current paper value of the stock they own. In addition, taxing the really wealthy will not yield much revenue either... the true billionaires don't need income. Instead of paying themselves income ( $50M or whatever ), they could pay themselves $50K/year. They then can borrow money from banks, pledging their stock assets as collateral, park some of that money in t-bills, tax free muni bonds, etc to pay the interest on the loan from the bank... and live on the rest of the loan ( buying the mansions and yachts and blowing $50M on weddings, etc ). They never have worry about paying the bulk of the loan back either... they simply roll over the loan into a new loan... and repeat as needed until they die. So taxing the billionaires is a lost cause, at least until a new system of taxes is created just for them. Taxing their assets... bad idea. Taxing their income... they have ways around it. Taxing their luxury assets, that might work... but many will just do without or lease rather than own.

We should have never let people become billionaires to begin with. But that is too late now.

[LiberalLovinLug]

15. So Kamala and the Democrats proposed things like a $50,000 tax exemption for new small businesses

How is that not promoting entrepreneurship? Building to the capitalist economy?

Oh..........I see. You just mean promoting and helping billionaires businesses become even more profitable and wealthy and their owners more influential. Gotcha.

[mdbl]

16. The guy is an idiot. His AI might turn out the same.

If he's that stupid to think all our problems can be worked out that way I would not trust anything he does.

[Quanto Magnus]

17. He's a liar like the rest of the billionaires

They have to keep lying, to keep up the 'trickle down' nonsense...

[Trust_Reality]

18. Such "wisdom" at the age of 20.

Try the real buddy.

[Clouds Passing]

19. There is no "magic" of capitalism. Capitalism is a horror show of greed and grift.

[ForgoTheConsequence]

21. He should be literally homeless.

Who gives a shit what this leech billionaire whiner thinks?

[travelingthrulife]

23. Gross. What a life philosophy.

[LudwigPastorius]

25. Altman is a shithead and a proven liar.

"WAAAAAHH! Democrats are stifling innovation and aren't raising the ceiling by cutting my taxes."

[RockRaven]

26. He is one of the most brazen liars and conmen in Silicon Valley/on Wall Street

and holy shit is that saying something.

[hatrack]

27. Delusional Tech-Bro is welcome to bite my bag just any old time . . .

Shorter version: Sam, we don't GAF.