Exclusive: Sam Altman Is Said to Have Pondered a Presidential Run

In 2016, Sam Altman was increasingly looking to politics as the arena where he could realize his soaring ambitions. That fall, his high school ex, Nathan Watters, visited San Francisco, accompanying his new boyfriend to a job interview. While Watters’s boyfriend was out, Watters and Altman had lunch at a cafe near Dolores Park, not far from Altman’s $5 million Victorian. The topic turned to the upcoming general presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Watters said Altman told him that if Clinton didn’t win, he was going to run for president: “‘If she doesn’t get it, and Trump does, I can’t have that again. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna run. I think I can win,’” Watters recalled him saying. “I’m sure he did think he could win.” Altman disputes that he said this, and says he never wanted to run for president.

In early October, The New Yorker published an 11,000-word profile of Altman which revealed the full scope of his ambition to a general audience for the first time. “Like everyone in Silicon Valley, Altman professes to want to save the world; unlike almost everyone there, he has a plan to do it,” wrote Tad Friend. The article treated his presidential ambitions as a joke—the kind of thing his brothers, Max and Jack, would tease him about while the three of them made pasta. After they pointed out that in 2020 Sam would be thirty-five, just old enough to legally qualify, Altman shot back: “Let’s send the Jewish gay guy! That’ll work!”

‘The Optimist’ by Keach Hagey

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Inside Y Combinator, the prestigious startup accelerator that Altman had been running for two years, the partners were stunned by the New Yorker profile. “Sam told all the partners, ‘Hey, this is going to be about YC,’ and it ends up being about Sam. And everyone was like, ‘Look we don’t give a fuck, but like, why did you tell us this?’” one YC partner said. They didn’t have long for such carping, however. Days after it was published, YC faced an uproar over Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign. Thiel was a part-time YC partner, a largely honorific role, and his support for Trump was hardly a secret; he’d appeared at the Republican National Convention over the summer, delivering a speech where he’d declared that he was “proud to be gay.”

Nevertheless, the extent of the support—especially in light of the leak on October 7, 2016, of an Access Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women by the genitals—was more than the largely liberal Silicon Valley could bear. Ten days later, Ellen Pao, the former Reddit CEO who had gone on to co-found a nonprofit focused on diversity, said that her organization was cutting ties with YC over its association with Thiel. “Because of his continued connection to YC, we are compelled to break off our relationship with YC,” she wrote. “Today it is clear to us that our values are not aligned.” Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment was more pointed regarding the connections between YC, Thiel, and Trump. “This is literally paying a huge amount of money to directly support a racist, sexist bigot with rapidly mounting allegations of multiple sexual assaults,” he wrote.

Privately, Altman was also mystified why Thiel would support someone like Trump. They had several conversations about it. “I was not trying to tell people not to vote for Trump,” Altman said. “I was really trying to understand it.” But when the internet began melting down over Thiel’s support, Altman stepped in with a forceful defense of both his friend and the principle of intellectual freedom. He disagreed with Thiel on this matter—in fact, he found Trump to be “an unacceptable threat to America” and “unfit to be president”—but tweeted, “YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee.”

When Trump won, Altman was devastated. He had tried to prevent it in the only way he knew how—by funding and building a piece of software, in this case a “Turbo Tax of voter registration” called VotePlz. Now he turned once again to code, building a website called Track Trump to measure how President Trump’s actions during his first one hundred days would measure up against his campaign promises. And he used Facebook to solicit introductions to one hundred Trump voters across the country so that he could ask them directly about their decision; he published his findings on his blog. One quote, in Altman’s view, got to the heart of the matter of what too many Democrats had failed to recognize: “You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out.”

Trump’s upset victory had instantly turned Thiel into the most powerful political force in Silicon Valley, after he had stood largely alone before a chorus of haters for his contrarian long shot, and prevailed. (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, a member of Facebook’s board, had gone so far as to try to push fellow member Thiel off it, arguing his support for Trump showed “catastrophically bad judgement.”) Altman, for his part, had a decision to make: Should he really pursue the presidential run he had told Watters about? Or should he run for something else? Should he run for office at all, or should he try to recruit others to do it in his stead?

Altman still wanted to understand Trump’s victory. A contact put him in touch with Charles Johnson, an alt-right blogger and political operative who had worked with Thiel to plot the destruction of the snarky blog empire Gawker Media. Johnson had come up through conservative campus politics and taken a tour at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller before starting his own outlet, GotNews. In 2014, after Rolling Stone ran a story about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia that it later retracted, Johnson published the full name of the alleged victim—in violation of journalistic norms—and a photo of the wrong woman, for which he later apologized. That drew the mocking attention of Gawker, which called Johnson “the Web’s Worst Journalist” and made up a series of wild claims—“there is no evidence that Chuck Johnson was arrested in 2002 for pinning a sheep to a fence and fucking it”—meant as joking commentary on what Gawker implied was Johnson’s fast-and-loose, innuendo-laden brand of journalism.

Johnson sued Gawker Media for defamation, which got the attention of a friend of Thiel’s who knew that the billionaire was in the midst of a nearly decade-long secret plot to take down the company after its tech-focused blog Valleywag outed him in 2007. According to Max Chafkin’s book about Thiel, The Contrarian, Johnson joined Thiel’s crusade, which ultimately settled on secretly funding a lawsuit filed by Hulk Hogan for invasion of privacy after Gawker posted a surreptitiously taped video of him having sex with his friend’s wife. Gawker Media lost the case and filed for bankruptcy in 2016. (To this day, few things delight Thiel more than recalling his dismantling of what he still calls “the Manhattan-based terrorist organization.”)

Altman flew down to meet Johnson at his home in Arcadia, California. “He told me he thought he could be governor of California, and president of the United States,” Johnson recalls. “He said, ‘There’s going to be a millennial president.’” Altman believed that Gavin Newsom, the favorite to succeed then California Governor Jerry Brown in the 2018 election, was a weaker candidate than most people understood, Johnson said. Altman also had a vivid, techno-utopian vision for what California could be: a state with an economy so large that it could fund its own basic scientific research into nuclear energy and AGI, where the tax code could be tweaked to discourage real estate speculation in order to bring down the cost of housing, and an expanded social safety net—perhaps through UBI—that would make society fairer while eliminating the bureaucracy of many of the current social welfare programs.

Johnson introduced Altman to his political contacts in California. Altman sought advice on both sides of the aisle, including Dominic Cummings, the former advisor to British prime minister Boris Johnson, and Chris Lehane, the former advisor to President Bill Clinton. In April 2017, Vice News Tonight correspondent Nellie Bowles asked Altman during an onstage interview whether he would consider running for office. “I don’t think charisma is my strength,” he replied. But Altman privately continued to explore whether he might run to become California’s governor, visiting Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, in May to seek his advice. At the meeting, Altman pitched Brown on his plans to use technology to help end income inequality, and to reach voters digitally. Brown immediately sold Altman out, writing about the meeting in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I told him California has a history of millionaires running for public office on their own dime,” Brown wrote. “Most wind up paying consultants a whole lot of money and losing.”

Many of the businesspeople in Altman’s life—including Thiel and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz—counseled him against running for office. “I thought he was crazy to do it,” Moritz said. “I think it’s this innocence of a lot of businesspeople when they look at government and think it’s all messed up. And because of their experience in the private sector, they know what it takes to make government run more efficiently than it does, and they massively underestimate that to flourish in politics, you need to have grounding in the political arena. You need to understand how it works.”

Altman now characterizes his thoughts of running for governor as a passing flight of fancy. “I thought about it for a few weeks. I toyed with the idea at a not-very-high level of seriousness. I went to Sacramento to spend some time with then Governor

Brown, and it was super clear to me that I didn’t want that job and wouldn’t have been good at it.” (Jerry Brown’s longtime chief of staff, Evan Westrup, said Brown had no memory of meeting with Altman.)

By July, Altman was ready to pass the torch to others, posting a detailed political platform online that included Medicare for All, raising taxes on short-term capital gains, and shifting 10 percent of the US defense budget to researching future technologies. He said he would help back candidates willing to adopt the platform. The most important plank, at least to Altman, was one devoted to measures to reduce the cost of housing. As the online news outlet The Outline put it in a headline: “A Silicon Valley kingmaker wants to fix what tech did to California.”

The platform, dubbed The United Slate, was created with the help of Matt Krisiloff, twenty-five, who Altman would begin dating later that year. Graduating from the University of Chicago in 2014, Krisiloff then moved to Santiago, Chile, to work on a startup, and had gotten to know Altman after emailing him for advice. When Krisiloff pitched Altman on launching a program at YC for earlier-stage companies, Altman hired him there, and eventually tapped him to lead YC Research. Krisiloff then recruited his older brother, Scott, who was working in finance, and the three of them became The United Slate. (Both Krisiloffs would remain in Altman’s orbit in various capacities for many years, with Scott going on to work for Hydrazine, Altman’s venture fund, and then Helion, the nuclear fusion startup he backed, and Matt founding a startup that Altman invested in seeking to make it possible for two gay men to have a child genetically related to both of them.) Altman’s United Slate platform ended up backing the congressional candidacy of Josh Harder, a Democrat and venture capitalist with degrees from Stanford and Harvard, who went on to beat an incumbent Republican for a House seat representing much of the Bay Area.

Even as Altman decided against entering politics personally, his association with OpenAI was bringing him into the highest circles of political power. In its final year, the Obama administration took an interest in AI, convening a series of talks around the country that one of OpenAI’s newest hires, a former Bloomberg journalist named Jack Clark, participated in as part of the lab’s communications operation. In October 2016, the White House released a large report calling for more federal funding of basic AI research, which President Barack Obama then promoted in an interview with Wired that made it sound as though he had been reading Altman’s blog (or Musk’s tweets).

“Part of the problem that we’ve seen is that our confidence in collective action has been chipped away, partly because of ideology and rhetoric,” Obama told Wired. He called for a return to the days of the Apollo space program, which was backed by government funding equivalent to half a percent of US GDP. In 2015, the US government spent roughly $1 billion on AI research. To get to Apollo-level, that would have to rise to around $80 billion in 2016 dollars. He saw it as the government’s job to make sure that AI was developed outside tech behemoths like Google and Facebook. “If we want the values of a diverse community represented in these breakthrough technologies, then government funding has to be part of it.”

Within weeks of Obama uttering these words, Trump won the election and the Democrats’ AI agenda was swept aside. Years later, after ChatGPT had made OpenAI a household name, Altman would say that the young lab had gone to the government in its early years—presumably sometime in 2017 or 2018, he declined to specify—looking for funding, and had gotten nowhere. “I don’t blame them at all,” he said, “because at the time we were a few people sitting around saying ‘We’re going to try to figure out AGI someday’ with basically nothing to show.”

Excerpted from The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. Copyright (c) 2025 by Keach Hagey. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.