Politics can make for strange bedfellows.
Sam Altman is grappling with his political alignment. The 40-year-old CEO of OpenAI, like many of his fellow tech executives in recent years, has expressed that he does not feel at home in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. In an extended post on X, Altman lamented the fact that he’s now “politically homeless” and yearns for a technocratic utopia—something his once friend and current rival Elon Musk has also been calling for with his push to form a third party. Hmm…interesting timing, yeah?
Altman, who claimed in his post that he’s “not big on identities,” mapped his political evolution over the last couple decades—or rather, how political parties have evolved to move away from him. “The world should get richer every year through science and technology, but everyone has to be in the ‘up elevator‘,” he wrote. He also articulated his beliefs that free markets are more efficient than government, that innovation and entrepreneurship are important, and that education is key to America maintaining its edge. Pretty traditional libertarian fare, frankly.
“I believed this when I was 20, when I was 30, and now I am 40 and still believe it. The Democratic party seemed reasonably aligned with it when I was 20, losing the plot when I was 30, and completely to have moved somewhere else at this point. So now I am politically homeless. But that’s fine; I care much, much more about being American than any political party,” Altman wrote.
