The Person Who Was in Charge of OpenAI's $175 Million Fund Appears to Be Fake
A doozy of a scoop by the newsletter Nongaap Investing and extensively followed up by Business Insider certainly makes us wonder. The gist is that for a period of time in 2023, the person in charge of OpenAI's $175 million startup fund appears to have been completely fake — and OpenAI says the documents filed with the California Secretary of State to put the fake person in charge were "completely fabricated."
Head spinning yet? Us too. OpenAI is almost certainly the hottest startup on the planet right now, and it sounds like someone pulled an extrardinary fast one on it, with unclear goals. And lest you think this is some unimportant position, the person now running the fund is none other than OpenAI's mercurial CEO, Sam Altman.
A pair of documents filed about a year ago in 2023 established the seemingly fake person, Jacob Thomas Vespers, as the manager of the fund, and provided an address corresponding to an affordable housing complex in Santa Ana, California that denied any connection to OpenAI.
