How Sam Altman outfoxed Elon Musk to become Trump's AI buddy

Mint

2 days ago

Just two weeks after Elon Musk's spectacular breakup with President Trump, the tech billionaire's nemesis strode into the dining room of the president's New Jersey golf club wearing a suit and a wide smile.
Sam Altman, the 40-year-old chief executive of OpenAI, had just finished a long one-on-one meeting with Trump, and the two men were about to dine with the president's top donors. Trump introduced Altman to the club's applauding members as 'a very brilliant man," adding: 'I hope he's right about AI."
That warm reception in June was a far cry from the cold shoulder Altman got in the first few weeks after Trump's election. Altman was estranged from Musk, his OpenAI co-founder, and Musk's new position as 'first buddy" had kept Altman out of meetings at Mar-a-Lago and in the overflow room at the inauguration rather than on the dais with his fellow tech CEOs.
So Altman bided his time, quietly maneuvering around Musk. He put together AI infrastructure deals that Trump supported and avoided his former friend, who had sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, for allegedly betraying its mission.
Altman forged his own relationship with the president, dining with him at Mar-a-Lago in March and speaking to him on the phone from time to time. A longtime Democrat who had once compared Trump to Hitler, Altman told associates he now regretted his harsh criticism during Trump's first campaign and term.
On July 4, Altman posted on X that he was no longer a Democrat, saying the party had moved to the left so much that it had left him 'politically homeless."
It was an opportune time to change political stripes. Musk's abrupt departure from Trump's inner circle has left an open lane for Altman to secure government support for a huge global AI infrastructure build-out he needs—and to have more influence over AI regulation. That could have implications on how the U.S. government approaches the role of AI in everything from defense contracts to energy policy.
President Trump at a May 30 White House news conference with departing DOGE adviser Elon Musk.
In a sign of Altman's rising influence, he will be the keynote speaker at a Federal Reserve conference later this month, addressing central bankers about AI's impact on the economy.
'President Trump is thinking big about American AI and building the infrastructure we need to stay ahead," said an OpenAI spokesperson. 'We look forward to continuing our work with him to grow the economy and make sure AI benefits everyone."
This account of the behind-the-scenes relationship between Trump and Altman is based on interviews with White House officials, technology executives, lobbyists and political donors.
Altman and Trump make for unlikely allies. For decades, Altman donated almost exclusively to Democrats, reflecting the progressive—if somewhat libertarian-tinged—values of his high-tech milieu.
Altman endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 because, he wrote on his blog, 'Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America." Trump was 'erratic, abusive and prone to fits of rage," Altman said, and his presidency would be 'a disaster for the American economy." Nearly everyone else in Silicon Valley other than his mentor Peter Thiel, Altman said, found him 'repugnant."
Earlier that summer, Altman had written a blog post arguing that 'Trump is right about some big things," including 'that the economy is not growing nearly fast enough" and 'that we're drowning in political correctness." But he disagreed strongly with how Trump proposed to address these issues. 'To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s," he wrote in that post, 'it's chilling to watch Trump in action."
Altman in 2016 at a conference in Dresden, Germany. He endorsed Hillary Clinton for president that year.
At the same time, Altman was getting more concerned about the economic policy of Democrats. As the Biden administration readied its Covid-era economic stimulus, Altman warned his contacts in the government that the infusion would cause inflation and run up the national debt. He remained a loyal Democrat, though, donating $200,000 to Joe Biden's re-election campaign in 2023.
Altman also was growing disillusioned with the Biden administration's AI policy. He considered the signature CHIPS and Science Act, which aimed to bring chip fabrication back onto American soil, to be laughably small in the roughly $50 billion it set aside for developing and producing the semiconductors, and wrongheaded in its desire to spread out money.
The Biden administration's limits on exporting chips to countries where rivals like China might get hold of them thwarted Altman's yearslong efforts to build AI infrastructure in the Middle East—and attract investment from the region.
In the spring of 2024, OpenAI started wooing Trump as part of the company's outreach to both parties. Altman and other OpenAI executives decided to appeal to Trump's background as a builder and his love of winners by framing OpenAI as the leader in the AI field, then to dazzle him with their technology. It worked.
That June, OpenAI executives met Trump in a hotel in Las Vegas and showed off the then-unreleased text-to-video generator Sora, which would be sending cold shivers down Hollywood spines by the end of the year. They also made a case for government investment in AI infrastructure—and for sweeping aside local regulations and environmental reviews—to beat China.
A couple of days later, Trump told podcaster Logan Paul that the U.S. needed to 'take the lead over China" in AI. 'The electricity needs are greater than anything we've ever needed before to do AI at the highest level. And China will produce it because they'll do whatever you have to do, whereas we have environmental impact people, and we have a lot of people trying to hold us back."
By July's Republican National Convention, the need for an AI infrastructure build-out had become part of Trump's platform. A week later, Altman echoed the sentiment in an op-ed in the Washington Post, arguing that 'infrastructure is destiny" in the fight between 'democratic" AI controlled by the U.S. and its allies and 'authoritarian" AI controlled by countries like China and Russia.
Although Altman's views were aligned with Trump on that, he neither donated to nor endorsed either candidate last year. But he continued to hammer his infrastructure point, publishing an essay that September that argued, 'If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips)."
When Trump won, Altman might have had a willing partner for that agenda—were it not for Musk. By then, Musk had sued Altman and was competing against OpenAI with his own company, xAI. He also had become Trump's biggest donor and rarely left his side. Musk had even given a Trump-style nickname to Altman: 'Swindly Sam."
So while other tech CEOs could fly down to Mar-a-Lago in the weeks after the election, Altman was stuck working through intermediaries. The closest he got was a tense meeting in Palm Beach with Howard Lutnick, Trump's then-nominee for Commerce secretary, who yelled at him for being a leftist.
Chris LaCivita, an adviser to Trump's 2024 campaign, made introductions to people in Trump's circle.
Realizing it needed outside help, OpenAI hired Jeff Miller, the influential MAGA lobbyist and fundraiser, and Chris LaCivita, an adviser to Trump's 2024 campaign, who both made introductions to people in Trump's circle. Another person who vouched for Altman was Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, who had known Trump for years and was about to expand Oracle's business relationship with OpenAI.
Altman donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration. That got him a ticket, but not a seat on the stage.
The next day, he blindsided Musk by standing in the Oval Office with Trump for the announcement of a $500 billion partnership between OpenAI, Oracle and Japan's SoftBank—called Stargate—to build data centers to train and run AI models.
Musk, after learning the details on television, attacked the deal in a series of posts on X, alleging that SoftBank lacked the money to fund the deal. Altman hit back on X that he was wrong. Musk dug up an old tweet of Altman praising venture capitalist Reid Hoffman for his role in preventing Trump's 2020 re-election.
Altman responded with a post about his political evolution, saying that watching Trump 'more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him," adding 'i wish I had done more of my own thinking." He wrote, 'i'm not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!"
The spat got tense enough that Trump weighed in.
'He hates one of the people in the deal," Trump said in response to a reporter's question about whether Musk's criticisms of Stargate bothered him. 'People in the deal are very, very smart people, but Elon—one of the people he happens to hate. But I have certain hatreds of people, too."
The message seemed clear: Trump wouldn't let criticism from Musk stand in the way of working with Altman.
As soon as Trump took office, his administration began rolling out the kind of infrastructure-friendly policies that OpenAI had been lobbying for, including an executive order on Trump's first day—Unleashing American Energy—that would speed up permitting of energy projects.
When OpenAI held an AI summit in Washington on Jan. 30, Trump's interior secretary, Doug Burgum, attended, and Kellyanne Conway, who served as senior counselor to Trump in his first term and remains close to the White House, sat in the front row.
In March, Altman attended a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for donors who had each paid $1 million to his super PAC. Other diners that evening included David Sacks, Trump's AI czar.
By May, OpenAI and the Trump administration were ready to announce the next step in the Stargate partnership with Oracle and SoftBank—a data center in Abu Dhabi. The deal was only possible because the administration had decided to roll back Biden-era restrictions on the export of chips, a change it planned to formalize during a tour of the Middle East that month.
The plan was to build a gargantuan, five-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi to train and run AI models, in partnership with local tech company G42. OpenAI would get the first gigawatt, with subsequent tranches expected to go to other tech companies, including, most likely, Musk's xAI, though those weren't ready to be announced.
Musk had been forging his own relationships with Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, who controlled G42 and whose MGX fund invested in both xAI and OpenAI.
On May 14, journalists traveling with the president were briefed on the announcement, which was expected to happen with Trump and OpenAI the next day. But when Musk got wind that Altman was on the Middle East trip and planned to stand with the president and G42 for the announcement, he began to pepper Trump aides and his contacts at G42 with complaints. The situation escalated to the level that Trump was pulled out of a meeting to address it.
OpenAI and the Trump administration had planned to announce the next step in the Stargate partnership during the president's trip to the Middle East. Trump, above, toured a mosque in Abu Dhabi on May 15.Plans for the Stargate announcement changed after Musk got wind that Altman was on the trip. Trump speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One., after leaving Abu Dhabi.
G42, concerned about Musk's outbursts, decided to pull the announcement. The journalists were told to hold their stories until further notice. To appease Musk, the White House agreed that no one from the U.S. government would be present during the announcement, and the news would be pushed back a week to when Trump's tour of the Middle East was finished. The deal was announced a week later, with less fanfare than initially planned.
The episode bothered some senior White House staffers. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported on May 28 about Musk's attempts to block the deal, the Tesla CEO announced that he was leaving the White House and began to openly criticize Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill."
After Trump declined to choose Musk's pick for head of NASA, Musk's criticism of the tax-and-spending bill escalated into a flame war for the ages, during which he called for Trump's impeachment. Within a week of the Abu Dhabi deal, Musk's relationship with Trump was in tatters.
Altman, for his part, continued to forge closer ties. On June 16, OpenAI announced a $200 million contract with the Pentagon.
The Trump administration is expected to unveil its AI action plan later this month. OpenAI has been lobbying for it to include measures that would make it easier to build AI infrastructure. The Journal has reported that the White House is considering giving federal land to tech companies for the data centers needed to train their models.
Altman speaking to reporters earlier this month at the Allen & Co. media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
'I believe in techno-capitalism," Altman recently posted on X, explaining his decision to leave the Democratic Party. 'We should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism."
He outlined a worldview in which every year people grow richer through science and technology, that markets do a better job than government and education helps America keep its edge.
'I believed this when I was 20, when I was 30, and now I am 40 and still believe it," he said. '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."
Altman doesn't consider himself a Republican, but has told people he could see himself voting Republican in the next election.
Write to Keach Hagey at [e-mail], Dana Mattioli at [e-mail] and Josh Dawsey at [e-mail]