It is hard to paint a portrait of Sam Altman without falling into the starry-eyed Silicon Valley hagiography he helped write, or into the knee-jerk critique of tech solutionism. Out of nowhere (well, out of St. Louis, Missouri), this child prodigy who was coding at 8 and came out in high school lands at Stanford in 2003… only to drop out after a year and launch Loopt 🇺🇸, a location-based social network. He sells the company for $43M in 2012 to Green Dot 🇺🇸, but what really makes his name is his time running Y Combinator 🇺🇸 from 2014 to 2019. Between investments in Airbnb 🇺🇸, Dropbox 🇺🇸, Stripe 🇺🇸 and Reddit 🇺🇸, “Sam the visionary” becomes the oracle of a whole generation of founders dreaming of getting into YC.
In 2015, he co-founds OpenAI 🇺🇸, officially to develop AI that benefits humanity, with other experts from the field:
Four years later, Musk slams the door, denouncing the project’s commercial drift, just before Altman turns the non-profit into a “capped” for-profit company. What follows is a frantic race for ever bigger language models, especially since the huge success of ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, which finished convincing Microsoft 🇺🇸, which put in $10bn.
Meanwhile, Altman piles up personal investments in futuristic projects, from nuclear fusion (Helion 🇺🇸) to cryptocurrencies (Worldcoin 🇺🇸) by way of life extension (Retro Biosciences 🇺🇸), like the good transhumanist he is.
Sometimes the Cassandra of AI (which must be regulated urgently), sometimes the pragmatic entrepreneur (who rejects any moratorium on research), it is hard to know what Altman really thinks. Even though what is in his head could well be the philosophy of the coming decades.
What has not already been said about Elon Musk? Born in 1971 in South Africa, he starts life with an emerald spoon in his mouth thanks to his father Errol, who owns shares in a mine in Zambia. After a childhood of being bullied at school and a rather toxic relationship with his father (whom he would later call a terrible human being, which says a lot), he leaves for Canada at 17, with $2,000 in his pocket and a visa obtained through his mother, a model, to whom he has stayed close.
A few years later, Penn degree in hand, he launches Zip2 with his brother Kimbal and sells it for $307M to Compaq in 1999, at the height of the dotcom bubble. Straight after, he founds X.com, which merges with Confinity to become PayPal, of which he becomes CEO1. Except that in the summer of 2000, while he is on honeymoon in Australia with his first wife Justine, his board decides to fire him.
Musk would later say that at first he was very angry, that thoughts of murder crossed his mind, but that he ended up seeing getting fired as a good thing: otherwise, he would still be slaving away at PayPal.
Adding, with all due modesty:
Had he stayed, according to him, PayPal would be a trillion-dollar company.
He still pockets $250M when eBay buys PayPal for $1.5bn, making him a half-billionaire at barely 30.
What next? An episode of Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?, Silicon Valley edition. Musk throws almost his entire jackpot into 4 pretty crazy bets:
Between astronomical funding rounds, unrealistic deadlines and barely believable promises, he turns these startups into an empire worth several hundred billion, while juggling reusable rocket launches and mass production of electric cars.
But SpaceX has not always been plain sailing. In 2008, after three consecutive Falcon 1 failures, SpaceX is flat broke for a fourth attempt. The Founders Fund of Peter Thiel (ex-PayPal), Ken Howery and Luke Nosek puts in €20M. And then, bingo, the fourth attempt is a success. NASA then signs up for 12 round trips to the International Space Station, all for $1.6bn.
And then there is the unhinged version of Musk we know today, the hard-right troll addicted to Twitter, which he buys for $44bn in 2022 in circumstances worthy of an episode of The Office. Between his anti-vax outbursts during Covid, his obsessions with “wokeism” and his dubious memes, he turns part of his own family against him.
According to a source close to the family, it is in fact within the family that Musk is said to have started to go off the rails. In 2020, one of the six children he had with Justine Musk tells him she is transgender. She wants to be called Vivian. Furious, Musk reportedly threatened to cut her off. Vivian eventually took her mother’s name, Wilson, and kept her distance. An episode that seems to have marked Musk deeply, and launched his crusade against what he calls woke ideology. Not to mention his strange tweets, or the time he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.
A former Democrat who backed Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, he turns to the Republicans in 2022 and backs DeSantis in 2024. But as soon as DeSantis pulls out, he moves closer to Trump, whom he would back actively, publicly and (very) loudly after an assassination attempt in July 2024.
Today, Elon Musk is one of the most scrutinised people on the planet and arguably one of the most powerful, after Trump put him in charge of DOGE, named after a meme coin, to cut US spending. A real adventure novel.
Born in New York in 1944, Larry Ellison, for his part, starts life with a plastic spoon in his mouth. Adopted at 9 months after nearly dying of pneumonia, he grows up on Chicago’s South Side. From a very young age, his adoptive father tells him he will never amount to anything. For him, that becomes a motivation. After dropping out of university twice and arriving in California in 1966, he drifts between odd jobs. It is at Ampex that he finds his path, as a developer, working on a project called Oracle for the CIA. Just the kind of mission he dreams of. In 1977, he goes it alone and founds Software Development Laboratories with $1,200 in his pocket, the future core of a company that will become Oracle Corporation.
In the 80s and 90s, as computing takes off, he turns Oracle into a monster of enterprise databases. And to get there, he does not hesitate to pile up aggressive acquisitions and sales practices that are not always gentle. The result: a reputation as a businessman with strong-arm methods and a taste for lawsuits with disgruntled shareholders. Yet he never lets go of the wheel and keeps the reins of Oracle until 2014, when he steps back from operations while keeping his seat as chairman of the board.
In 2000, he briefly becomes the richest man in the world, just before the dotcom bubble bursts. And the billionaire loves to show it. Yachts galore, private jets, and even a Hawaiian island bought for $300M. The image of the arrogant playboy who loves to flaunt his billions fits him like a glove. A sort of anti-Bill Gates, whom he has no qualms about calling a crook.
In short, Ellison is everything traditionalist America loves, promoting the self-made-man myth and the symbols of social success. No surprise, then, to see him back Trump and campaign actively at his side.
At 80, the former bad boy of tech has lost none of his reputation. Even if, along the way, he has somewhat changed his mind about AI, which not long ago he imagined could kill us all.
Born in 1957 into a family of zainichi Koreans2, Masayoshi “Masa” Son grows up in a Japan where his origins hold him back. At 16, without speaking a word of English, he manages to convince his teachers to let him go to the United States. At Berkeley, between physics classes, he develops an electronic translator that he sells for $1M to Sharp in 1978. Back in Japan, in 1981, he founds SoftBank (to which I devoted a whole newsletter) (in French), a small PC software distributor, before turning the company into a telecoms empire, notably by buying Vodafone Japan for $15bn in 2006. Not bad for a guy who started from nothing.
But Masa thinks bigger. He wants SoftBank to become the giant of tech investment. His stroke of genius: betting $20M on a Chinese website nobody cared about at the time, Alibaba. That bet turns into a $60bn jackpot at the 2014 IPO. That money lets him launch the Vision Fund in 2017, the biggest private equity fund in history, with $93bn raised, $45bn of it from the Saudi crown prince MBS. SoftBank puts in $28bn, and heavyweights like Apple, Qualcomm and Foxconn round it off. Larry Ellison puts in $1bn.
His ambition? Funding the next disruptive tech revolutions: AI, robotics, IoT. He does not do things by halves: he pours $7bn into Uber, $4.4bn into WeWork, $32bn into Arm, not to mention the billions poured into ByteDance, Nvidia, Didi... At its peak, the Vision Fund shows a return of 62%, with 71 investments worth $64bn.
But the empire wobbles in 2019. WeWork implodes after a resounding stock market fiasco: the startup goes from $47bn to $3bn in a few months. SoftBank has to cough up $9.5bn to avoid bankruptcy, taking its stake to 80%. Meanwhile Oyo, its Indian hotel bet, burns through billions at an alarming rate. Then the pandemic hits. In 2020, SoftBank posts a record loss of $13bn and Son has to publicly admit his mistakes.
But Masa is not one to stay down. In 2023, after a historic $32bn loss at the Vision Fund, he goes all-in on the IPO of Arm, valued at $54bn. The deal gives SoftBank some breathing room, even pulling the Vision Fund back into the black. In 2024, after buying the Vision Fund’s stake in Arm, Son massively refocuses SoftBank on artificial intelligence, aiming to make Arm the most important AI company in the world.
At 67, with a fortune estimated at $33bn and SoftBank’s $130bn of assets under management, Masa has nothing left to prove. Except, perhaps, to go down in history as the man who bet right… or too early.