Sam Altman has become the greatest genius of AI thanks to selling you the apocalypse:

"You could parachute him onto a cannibal island and, when you come back in five years, he would be the king."

The description, courtesy of his mentor Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, captures the essence of Sam Altman better than any organizational chart.

As revealed in the recent biography The Optimist by Keach Hagey, Altman does not fit the archetypes of Silicon Valley.

He is not the product visionary like Steve Jobs nor the obsessive engineer like Bill Gates.

He is something older and more formidable: a master in the art of accumulating power. His true product is not code, but influence; his programming language is not Python, but human nature itself.

The story of his rise is not that of an inventor, but that of a strategist who understood before anyone else that, in the 21st century, whoever controls the narrative about the future controls the present.

"It is useful to focus on adding another zero to any success metric you define."

This personal philosophy, repeated like a mantra, is the engine that drives Altman far beyond mere wealth.

His ambition is not to accumulate but to transform; he doesn't want a slice of the pie; he wants to redesign the recipe of civilization.

His investments and parallel obsessions with OpenAI, nuclear fusion energy to solve the climate crisis, and a global cryptocurrency for universal basic income are not side projects but pieces of the same puzzle: the total reengineering of society.

This messianic scale allows him to frame the fierce commercial race of AI not as a struggle for market dominance, but as a necessary step in a crusade for the benefit of humanity. Such a mission, of course, justifies almost any tactical maneuver.