A religion that has a single ultimate human authority at the helm is called a cult.
I wonder if the writings of Sam Altman will be studied in a similar manner to Mein Kampf some day where people try to understand how someone was so unusually charismatic and driven that they were able to dazzle and charm millions of people to enthusiastically participate in rapid and willful destruction of entire societies to achieve some contrived "greater good".
In my experience Altman is only charismatic to tech nerds that have miscalibrated sociopath meters and normies find him immediately creepy and off-putting (even before he starts to say creepy and off-putting things).
It’s more that he's good at understanding and catering to the desires of a large network of powerful people, whose desires are in conflict with each other.
e.g. Elon was scared of Google / Larry Page and Demis (who he formerly funded), and Elon had money to spend. Sam helped him recruit key minds away from Google
Satya wants to make Google jump, and Sam figured out how to let him do that, in exchange for billions in computing resources
Early innovative researchers wanted a mission that's more interesting than incrementally improving Google, influence that’s more than they had at Google (where there was already senior technical and research leadership), and massive computing resources. Sam figured out how to fund that, by selling the vision to people with money (Vinod Khosla, etc.)
And later employees want to be in a compensation ladder that matches Google, and by all accounts Sam set that up. Ilya and the board probably weren’t worried about the stock option package that later employees got, so that’s a big reason Sam won the boardroom conflict, and why he got to create a friendly board.
It’s basically just trying to get everyone what they want, not charisma. Steve Jobs had charisma because he would personally get on stage and tell a story about products, and many of those stories came to fruition.
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To the degree it's true that Sam didn't take any equity, and agreed to be bound by the non-profit board which could fire him, then I'd say he "innovated" in politics. He let everyone trust him, until they no longer had the power to defy him.
He's basically good at staying at the center of a lot of powerful forces. But if powerful people had different desires, then he would just go with that. I don't see any evidence that he's a visionary or has real charisma.
Allegedly before corporations absolved themselves of any sense of loyalty to employees around the 80s - a regular company could fulfil this role in a person's life. But this sort of naivety is beaten out of employees after the first few betrayals/reorgs/layoffs until they understand the rules of raw capitalism.
But creating a religion is also a double-edged sword - those workers can also be the most bitter and vitriolic about the organisation if they fall out of alignment - just look at the constant drama with OpenAI to see what that looks like. Everyone can understand and integrate the concept of trading their time for money. But there is a cognitive dissonance when your employer has dual roles, that is only revealed when you are instructed to do something that contradicts the identity.
This essentially weeds out anyone who is unable to handle high levels of dissonance on a regular basis, which can explain a lot about why politics is the way it is. The religion creator's success isn't in founding a religion (anybody can do that), it is being able sustain it without the increasing dissonance tearing it apart.
Also, ^that's my book. It's free. You just read it. Making this today's Most Read Book in the World. Wow - success!
The hard work bit helps for sure but ultimately it’s optional.