Sam Altman Gets Fired from OpenAI…Here’s My Takeaway
The Amplified Impact Podcast
November 25th, 2023
Today, let’s dive into a crucial aspect of wealth-building: understanding assets, liabilities, and debt.
When I began my journey, I was clueless about money strategies, deep in debt, and living in a van.
The first lesson: assets put money in your pocket, while liabilities take money out.
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Now, about debt: it’s a double-edged sword. Consumer debt for status symbols? Not great. But using it to acquire income-generating assets, like real estate, that’s savvy.
My advice? Master making money without debt before diving into sophisticated financial strategies.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“In this case, Sam is an entrepreneur, but he had a board of directors who had ultimate control and the ability to fire him. As long as that dynamic exists, you are always vulnerable, no matter how valuable you are.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Alright, so I’m recording this on November 20, which is the Monday after the OpenAI board, out of the blue, fired Sam Altman. So late Friday, right before the close of the workday, the OpenAI board of directors called in Sam Altman and his cofounder and fired them. And it came so far, far out of left field for everybody that over the weekend it created this almost like Netflix series drama as Twitter was alight with people speculating about what happened. OpenAI’s directors, they alluded to the fact that Sam wasn’t being forthcoming with information, but for them to fire him like this in such a public way, and he is a very public figure. And if not familiar with Sam or OpenAI, sam is one of the perennial CEOs founders of our generation. He has done some tremendous things, and for a while at least, I don’t know a long time, but for a while he was the CEO of Y Combinator, which is like the Harvard of startup incubators. It’s probably the sweetest job that you can possibly have in Silicon Valley. He had that job.
Anthony Vicino:
He gave it up to go and start this nonprofit AI business, right? OpenAI, if you’re not familiar with that chat GPT at this point, you’ve been living under a rock for the last year. It pretty much has transformed the landscape of digital interfacing with computers and what it means for everything, actually. And it’s just the beginning. And so overnight, Sam built this business from zero to like $80 billion of valuation. And it’s on its way to being one of the most valuable companies in existence. It has the fastest adoption rate of any business ever. It’s broken all these crazy records and Sam Altman is universally loved and adored by everybody in Silicon Valley. Nobody’s ever had any harsh words, it seems like, to say, against the guy.
Anthony Vicino:
So for them to just fire him out of the blue was just so unexpected. Nobody saw it coming. So here we are on Monday. The situation is still rapidly evolving to the point where Satya, the CEO of Microsoft, has come out and he talked to Sam. He’s like, we’re going to bring you guys in because Microsoft is a big investor in OpenAI. He’s like, we’ll bring you into Microsoft, we’ll create your own division. All the OpenAI employees, like 250 of them, signed a petition that says if the board doesn’t resign and bring back Sam, that they’re going to resign, they’re going to go with Sam to whatever his new endeavor is. And through all of this, what I keep coming back to well, there’s a couple of different things, but what I keep coming back to is when you are working a job and somebody else has some kind of authority or power over you.
Anthony Vicino:
In this case, sam is an entrepreneur, but he had a board of directors who had ultimate control and the ability to fire him. As long as that dynamic exists, you are always vulnerable, no matter how valuable you are. Like, think about this. Sam created one of the most valuable companies in human existence, on its way to becoming the most valuable, most transformative technology we’ve ever seen. And they fire him out of the blue. Just out of the blue, just like that. Boom. Now, maybe he’s going to step back in and the board of directors is going to quit.
Anthony Vicino:
Maybe he’ll step back in, take over his business. Who knows? I don’t know how. Again, this is all rapidly evolving, but it just shows that even if that can happen to him, that can happen to you. If you’re working at W Two, anybody and everybody is expendable. And so the question that we have to ask ourselves is how do we make ourselves as resilient as possible or as antifragile as possible? As Naseem Tlub would say, how do we make it so that if we’re working, in that environment like Sam was, and he gets fired, how do we make sure that we can bounce back and that we’re in a position to continue thriving regardless? Because I thought this was the most interesting thing, sam, the way he treated all this. He wasn’t upset. Well, he was probably upset, but he wasn’t like, spitting venom on Twitter or anything like that. He was like, you know what? I’m going to assess what’s going on and look to build the next thing.
Anthony Vicino:
So he’s already thinking about building the next thing. And he knew that he would land on his feet because he has the skill sets, the personality traits, the resources and the reputation to be able to go and do literally whatever he wants to do. And so getting fired didn’t really matter to him. I mean, I’m sure it mattered in the sense of, like, it hurts and all the drama that it caused. And no doubt that getting ousted from your own business is brutal, but he can go do whatever he wants, so his livelihood is not tied to this. Now, granted, he was stupidly wealthy before all of this, and he wasn’t drawing an income or didn’t have any shares in OpenAI, so he was doing this very altruistically. So you can make an argument like he was never really needing this job anyway. But I think that’s where we need to be in life in general.
Anthony Vicino:
If you want to make yourself like, this unassailable fortress of solidity financial freedom, to be able to live life on your terms how you want. And maybe that doesn’t mean that you have to have all the money in the bank. Maybe it means that you have to have all the skills, the resources, the network, so that if something happens in your life and you get fired and let go for whatever reason, through no fault of your own, that you can land on your feet and you can jump into the next opportunity. And that’s why I’m such a big proponent of building a personal brand. Regardless of if you are working at W Two and regardless if you monetize that personal brand, I don’t think those things even matter. I think sharing your story, sharing your expertise, putting out the content into the world to build the brand, the reputation around who you are and what you do is only a benefit to you because something goes wrong in life. If you have that platform of people who know, like and trust you, you can just one DM, one email, one tweet, and suddenly you have that next opportunity lined up. It’s the ultimate form of life insurance, I think, at this point, because it is so simple and straightforward to build a personal brand, I don’t see any reason why people aren’t doing that, regardless of what roles that they’re in.
Anthony Vicino:
You don’t need to think, oh, I want to be a thought leader and go have a million subscribers. Doesn’t have to be like that. You can be locally famous within your industry. That’s totally doable. And I think it behooves you to take out that life insurance policy. Because if this open AI situation is any indicator, we are all expendable at the end of the day. So hope this message brings you a little bit of value. I have no idea where this OpenAI story is going to goes, so we’ll stay tuned and see if it continues to develop.
Anthony Vicino:
I’m waiting for the Netflix special. I think it’s going to be so damn interesting to see behind closed doors what happened here, but that’s going to do it for me, guys and gals, I’ll catch you tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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