Tag: silicon valley

Greg Brockman Defends $30B OpenAI Stake: ‘Blood, Sweat, and Tears’

Posted on by faz_business


Two days before the Musk v. Altman trial began, Elon Musk asked OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman about reaching a settlement. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Musk responded, “By the end of this week, you and Sam [Altman] will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it.”

The message—which OpenAI’s lawyers made public on Sunday, and which Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers subsequently refused to let the jury hear about—underscores what may be Musk’s larger goal in this trial. He appears to be trying to not only win over the jurors to potentially remove Brockman and CEO Sam Altman from power, but also stir up dirt on the two men and damage OpenAI’s public image.

As Brockman took the stand on Monday, Musk’s attorney Steven Molo quickly started questioning him about his compensation at OpenAI. Brockman revealed that his equity stake at OpenAI is currently worth more than $20 billion, and perhaps up to $30 billion. While Brockman initially promised to donate $100,000 to OpenAI when it was being set up, he said he ultimately never followed through.

Brockman has held a number of instrumental roles at OpenAI since he cofounded the company in 2015. In the startup’s early days, it operated out of his apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. Today, he’s deeply involved with refocusing OpenAI on a few key products, such as Codex. In the past year, Brockman has also given millions to super PACs promoting AI and President Trump, and has previously said this increased political spending is related to OpenAI’s founding mission to create artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity.

In court on Monday, Molo tried to make the case that Brockman and Altman had essentially looted OpenAI’s original nonprofit, which Musk funded and helped create.

In its early days, OpenAI told investors and employees that its nonprofit mission took precedence over generating profit. Brockman testified that his financial interests are still, to this day, second to OpenAI’s nonprofit mission.

When OpenAI created its for-profit arm in 2019, which received assets from the nonprofit, Brockman testified that he was given a significant stake in the new entity. Early in OpenAI’s history, Brockman had referenced wanting to be a billionaire, writing in his personal journal, “Financially what will take me to $1B?”

On Monday, Molo pressed Brockman for several minutes about the vast wealth he had accumulated beyond his initial goal.

“Why not donate that $29 billion to the OpenAI nonprofit? Why didn’t you do that?” Molo asked. Brockman responded that he and others had poured “blood, sweat, and tears” into building OpenAI in the years since Musk left the company.

OpenAI’s foundation holds a stake of over $150 billion in the company, making it one of the richest nonprofits in history, Brockman said. That’s roughly five times Brockman’s ownership interest. Altogether, OpenAI employees hold about 25 percent of shares. The foundation has 27 percent. Brockman testified that OpenAI’s nonprofit had received less than $150 million from donors, implying Musk had been incidental to the company’s success and that the real drivers were those who stuck around to build out OpenAI.

Of course, Brockman’s stake in OpenAI could be worth much more than $30 billion if the company successfully goes public in the next two years. When asked whether OpenAI was exploring a potential IPO, Brockman said he believes so.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: ‘We Are a City on the Rise’

Posted on by faz_business


I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED’s Big Interview event, held in his city last week.

Lurie’s team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He’d just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? “No idea,” Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees—a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie’s every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he’s done since taking office in January of this year.

To Lurie’s credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city’s downtown, and as Lurie’s office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime—including homicides and car break-ins—are at historic lows.

I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration’s dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump’s October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco—an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor.

Lurie wasn’t exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It’s a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie’s local fans don’t seem to mind his “say less” strategy—at least for now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Oh, wow. Some fans in the audience. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating. Wow, god.

DANIEL LURIE: How are my socks? Oh, they’re black. I usually have more fun socks on.

We Mapped DOGE’s Silicon Valley and Corporate Connections

Posted on by faz_business


Since the first days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been everywhere in the federal government, moving fast and breaking things. In a matter of weeks, DOGE operatives have spread across dozens of government agencies as they have attempted to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees. With so much focus on where DOGE is going, WIRED wanted to take a beat to look at where they’ve come from and what that might tell us about how they’re thinking about reshaping the federal government.

The big takeaway: Many on the DOGE team are from Musk’s world. If Musk is America’s CEO, then DOGE has become his Silicon Valley executive branch.

We’ve mapped out a non-exhaustive list of people affiliated with DOGE, including creating a searchable table with each member, their corporate history, and the agencies they’ve been connected to. Readers can check that out, and click through it, below. We plan to keep updating this as we find more DOGE operatives or as known affiliates move to new agencies.

We’re focused on the new people brought in under the second Trump administration or directly hired into agencies—as Special Government Employees (SGEs) or regular employees—who are operating as members of DOGE teams. This gets a little tricky because there are technically two DOGEs established under the president’s executive order. There’s the US DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the US Digital Service, that’s a permanent organization. Then there’s the temporary USDS organization, which wraps up on July 4, 2026, and through which SGEs can be hired.

Here’s what we’ve learned:

The DOGE world, as it stands, seems to break down into roughly three categories: former Trump officials, conservative lawyers, and imports from the Silicon Valley area (funders, founders, technologists, or people connected to them). In that first category we find people like DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. The two of them have been Musk’s guides to DC.

In that second category are people like James Burnham and Austin Raynor, both former clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, respectively. Jacob Altik, another conservative lawyer on the DOGE squad, has been selected to clerk for Gorsuch. Jeremy Lewin, who was part of DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worked with Second Lady Usha Vance’s former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that has also represented Tesla.

Then, the biggest throughline of all: Of those Silicon Valley imports, one of the most clear themes across DOGE’s ranks is fairly obvious: a connection to Elon Musk. Forty-nine people on our list have connections to Musk, his companies, or his greater network. This connection is most often through one of his allies or one of his companies. There are the obvious people like Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company, who have followed Musk across his various ventures. (Davis previously worked at SpaceX and assisted Musk in his overhaul of X, formerly Twitter.) Davis spearheaded the DOGE recruitment efforts before inauguration day and has continued to play a pivotal role in the organization. Similarly, SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, who is now at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), also helped Musk downsize Twitter’s staff in 2022.

There are people like many of the young engineers WIRED first identified who were given the keys to different government agencies, like Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, and Edward Coristine, who were all interns or employees at one of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, and Neuralink. (Musk has been involved in others, but these are the ones he controls.)