The Audacity

There’s a particular kind of denial that only sounds convincing if you’ve never been lied to. It goes like this: “That’s nonsense. I really love working with Sam.” Jensen Huang — CEO of Nvidia, maker of every chip that matters, the man who dresses like a leather-clad arms dealer at a rave — said this to reporters over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported that his $100 billion OpenAI investment had quietly stalled. The original deal was announced in September with the energy of a couple getting matching tattoos on vacation. Nvidia would build 10 gigawatts of compute. OpenAI would lease the chips. Jensen called it “the next leap forward.” Sam called it the future. There may as well have been a sunset. Five months later, Jensen is telling people the agreement was “nonbinding.” He’s privately criticizing what he describes as “a lack of discipline” in OpenAI’s business approach. When asked if the investment would be $100 billion, he replied, “No, no, nothing like that.” Babe. That is the “we’re not breaking up,

It was 2 AM on a Tuesday when I saw it: Sam Altman, CEO of a half-trillion-dollar company, posting what can only be described as a breakup letter to his ex. On X. I poured my tea. I sat down. I read it twice. Twelve paragraphs. The words “dishonest” and “authoritarian.” User numbers invoked with the energy of a man at a bar explaining his bench press. Somewhere between the third and fourth scroll, it hit me: this wasn’t a CEO defending strategy. This was an ex discovering you’re thriving. For context: Anthropic spent ten million dollars on Super Bowl ads. Sam spent the evening proving exactly how much that stung. Highlights include: – Complaining that Anthropic won’t let OpenAI use Claude to train competing models. – Describing this as “authoritarian,” apparently from inside a house made entirely of glass and NVIDIA chips. – Declaring, with a straight face, “This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.” This, from the man whose company: – Started as a nonprofit, went