Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., speaks during TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nuclear fusion is the ephemeral holy grail of climate technology. It would provide nearly limitless amounts of clean energy without the byproduct of long-lasting radioactive waste to be managed.
It’s also the biggest bet Silicon Valley luminary Sam Altman has ever made.
“This is the biggest investment I’ve ever made,” Altman told CNBC of his $375 million investment in Helion Energy, announced Friday. It’s part of a larger $500 million round that the start-up will use to complete the construction of a fusion facility near its headquarters in Everett, Washington.
Altman was the president of the Silicon Valley start-up shop Y Combinator from 2014 through 2019 and is now the CEO of Open AI, an organization that researches artificial intelligence, which he co-founded with Elon Musk and others. (Musk has since stepped away, citing conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI pursuits.) Altman has also been a big proponent of universal basic income, the idea that the government should give every citizen a basic living wage to compensate for technological disruptions that make some jobs irrelevant.
Years ago, Altman had made a list of the technologies he wanted to get involved in, and artificial intelligence and energy topped that list.
Altman visited four fusion companies, and made his first investment of $9.5 million into Helion 2015.
“I immediately upon meeting the Helion founders thought they were the best and their technical approach was the best by far,” he said.
Helion uses “pulsed magnetic fusion,” Kirtley explained. That means the company uses aluminum magnets to compress its fuel and then expand it to get electricity out directly.
Kirtley compares Helion’s fusion machine to a diesel engine, while older technologies are more like a campfire. With a campfire, you stoke the fire to generate heat. In a diesel engine, you inject the fuel into a container, then compress and heat the fuel until it begins to burn. “And then you use the expansion of it to directly do useful work,” said Kirtley.
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“By taking this new fresh approach and some of the old physics, we can we can move forward and do it fast,” Kirtley said. “The systems end up being a lot smaller, a lot faster to iterate, and then that gets us to commercially useful electricity, which is solving the climate change problem, as soon as possible.”
Helion Energy is using aneutronic fusion, meaning “they don’t have a lot high energy neutrons present in their fusion reaction,” according to Brett Rampal, the Director of Nuclear Innovation at the non-profit Clean Air Task Force.
There are still unknowns with aneutronic fusion, Rampal said.
“An aneutronic approach, like Helion Energy is pursuing, could have potential benefits that other approaches do not, but could also have different downsides and challenges to achieving commercial fusion energy production,” Rampal said.
Overall, though, Rampal believes the wave of investment and innovation in fusion over the last two decades is good news for the industry.
“With so much left to be proven for true commercial fusion approaches, coming at the problem from multiple different angles and trying to determine where the best pros and cons lie with individual technologies is exactly where the fusion industry should be right now,” Rampal told CNBC.
Altman’s three-part utopian vision
For Altman, fusion is part of his overall vision of increasing abundance through technological innovation — a vision that stands apart from many investors and thinkers in the climate space.
“Number one, I think it is our best shot to get out of the climate crisis,” Altman said.
More generally, “decreasing the cost of energy is one of the best ways to improve people’s quality of lives,” Altman said. “The correlation there is just incredibly big.”
Altman’s utopian vision encompasses three parts.
Artificial intelligence, Altman said, will drive the cost of goods and services down with exponential increases in productivity. Universal basic income will be necessary to pay people’s cost of living in the transition period where many jobs are eliminated. And virtually limitless, low-cost, green energy is the third part of Altman’s vision for the world.
Helion Energy co-founders, Chris Pihl (L) and David Kirtley (R).
Photo courtesy Helion Energy
“So for the same reason I’m so interested in AI, I think that fusion, as a path to abundant energy, is sort of the other part of the equation to get to abundance,” Altman told CNBC.
“I think fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we’re trying to work on with AI, and energy, which I think Helion has the most exciting thing in the entire world happening for right now.”
But Altman knows that fusion has been elusive for decades. “The joke in fusion is that it’s been 30 years away for 50 years,” he said.
Kirtley was similarly dismayed by the seemingly impossibly time frames to commercialize fusion. “I got into fusion, spent a couple of years learning everything I could about fusion and all the typical approaches, and actually pivoted away from fusion. I said that these timelines don’t help us,” Kirtley told CNBC.
He worked with NASA, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) working on space propulsion technology to help humans travel to Mars and beyond.
But the idea of using approaching fusion with new technologies drew Kirtley back.
The mission is personal for Kirtley, as tackling climate change is for so many. He moved from Southern California to Washington in 2008.
“I watch now Washington summers where we have fires now, and we didn’t when I first moved here,” he said. The urgency is tangible as they are “watching the glaciers melt on Mount Rainier.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman visits “Making Money With Charles Payne” at Fox Business Network Studios in New York on Dec. 4, 2024.
Mike Coppola | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s sister, Ann Altman, filed a lawsuit on Monday, alleging that her brother sexually abused her regularly between the years of 1997 and 2006.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, alleges that the abuse took place at the family’s home in Clayton, Missouri, and began when Ann, who goes by Annie, was three and Sam was 12. The filing claims that the abusive activities took place “several times per week,” beginning with oral sex and later involving penetration.
The lawsuit claims that “as a direct and proximate result of the foregoing acts of sexual assault,” the plaintiff has experienced “severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression, which is expected to continue into the future.”
The younger Altman has publicly made similar sexual assault allegations against her brother in the past on platforms like X, but this is the first time she’s taken him to court. She’s being represented by Ryan Mahoney, whose Illinois-based firm specializes in matters including sexual assault and harassment.
The lawsuit requests a jury trial and damages in excess of $75,000.
In a joint statement on X with his mother, Connie, and his brothers Jack and Max, Sam Altman denied the allegations.
“Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam,” the statement said. “We’ve chosen not to respond publicly, out of respect for her privacy and our own. However, she has now taken legal action against Sam, and we feel we have no choice but to address this.”
Their response says “all of these claims are utterly untrue,” adding that “this situation causes immense pain to our entire family.” They said that Ann Altman faces “mental health challenges” and “refuses conventional treatment and lashes out at family members who are genuinely trying to help.”
Sam Altman has gained international prominence since OpenAI’s debut of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022. Backed by Microsoft, the company was most recently valued at $157 billion, with funding coming from Thrive Capital, chipmaker Nvidia, SoftBank and others.
Altman was briefly ousted from the CEO role by OpenAI’s board in November 2023, but was quickly reinstated due to pressure from investors and employees.
This isn’t the only lawsuit the tech exec faces.
In March, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk sued OpenAI and co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and fiduciary duty. Musk, who now runs a competing AI startup, xAI, was a co-founder of OpenAI when it began as a nonprofit in 2015. Musk left the board in 2018 and has publicly criticized OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its original mission.
Musk is suing to keep OpenAI from turning into a for-profit company. In June, Musk withdrew the original complaint filed in a San Francisco state court and later refiled in federal court.
Last month, OpenAI clapped back against Musk, claiming in a blog post that in 2017 Musk “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” to serve as the company’s proposed new structure.
This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, DC, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo.
Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images
Meta employees took to their internal forum on Tuesday, criticizing the company’s decision to end third-party fact-checking on its services two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Company employees voiced their concern after Joel Kaplan, Meta’s new chief global affairs officer and former White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush, announced the content policy changes on Workplace, the in-house communications tool.
“We’re optimistic that these changes help us return to that fundamental commitment to free expression,” Kaplan wrote in the post, which was reviewed by CNBC.
The content policy announcement follows a string of decisions that appear targeted to appease the incoming administration. On Monday, Meta added new members to its board, including UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Trump, and the company confirmed last month that it was contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Among the latest changes, Kaplan announced that Meta will scrap its fact-checking program and shift to a user-generated system like X’s Community Notes. Kaplan, who took over his new role last week, also said that Meta will lift restrictions on certain topics and focus its enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations while giving users “a more personalized approach to political content.”
One worker wrote they were “extremely concerned” about the decision, saying it appears Meta is “sending a bigger, stronger message to people that facts no longer matter, and conflating that with a victory for free speech.”
Another employee commented that by “simply absolving ourselves from the duty to at least try to create a safe and respective platform is a really sad direction to take.” Other comments expressed concern about the impact the policy change could have on the discourse around topics like immigration, gender identity and gender, which, according to one employee, could result in an “influx of racist and transphobic content.”
A separate employee said they were scared that “we’re entering into really dangerous territory by paving the way for the further spread of misinformation.”
The changes weren’t universally criticized, as some Meta workers congratulated the company’s decision to end third-party fact checking. One wrote that X’s Community Notes feature has “proven to be a much better representation of the ground truth.”
Another employee commented that the company should “provide an accounting of the worst outcomes of the early years” that necessitated the creation of a third-party fact-checking program and whether the new policies would prevent the same type of fall out from happening again.
As part of the company’s massive layoffs in 2023, Meta also scrapped an internal fact-checking project, CNBC reported. That project would have let third-party fact checkers like the Associated Press and Reuters, in addition to credible experts, comment on flagged articles in order to verify the content.
Although Meta announced the end of its fact-checking program on Tuesday, the company had already been pulling it back. In September, a spokesperson for the AP told CNBC that the news agency’s “fact-checking agreement with Meta ended back in January” 2024.
Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship gestures as he speaks during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., Oct. 27, 2024.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
After the announcement of White’s addition to the board on Monday, employees also posted criticism, questions and jokes on Workplace, according to posts reviewed by CNBC.
White, who has led UFC since 2001, became embroiled in controversy in 2023 after a video published by TMZ showed him slapping his wife at a New Year’s Eve party in Mexico. White issued a public apology, and his wife, Anne White, issued a statement to TMZ, calling it an isolated incident.
Commenters on Workplace made jokes asking whether performance reviews would now involve mixed martial arts style fights.
In addition to White, John Elkann, the CEO of Italian auto holding company Exor, was named to Meta’s board.
Some employees asked what value autos and entertainment executives could bring to Meta, and whether White’s addition reflects the company’s values. One post suggested the new board appointments would help with political alliances that could be valuable but could also change the company culture in unintended or unwanted ways.
Comments in Workplace alluding to White’s personal history were flagged and removed from the discussion, according to posts from the internal app read by CNBC.
An employee who said he was with Meta’s Internal Community Relations team, posted a reminder to Workplace about the company’s “community engagement expectations” policy, or CEE, for using the platform.
“Multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review,” the employee posted. “It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work.”
The internal community relations team member added that “insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”
Several workers responded to that note saying that even respectful posts, if critical, had been removed, amounting to a corporate form of censorship.
One worker said that because critical comments were being removed, the person wanted to voice support for “women and all voices.”
Meta declined to comment.
— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Bitcoin slumped on Tuesday as a spike in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets broadly.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 4.8% at $97,183.80, according to Coin Metrics. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%.
The moves followed a sudden increase in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield after data released by the Institute for Supply Management reflected faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. services sector in December, adding to concerns about stickier inflation. Rising yields tend to pressure growth oriented risk assets.
Bitcoin traded above $102,000 on Monday and is widely expected to about double this year from that level. Investors are hopeful that clearer regulation will support digital asset prices and in turn benefit stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood.
However, uncertainty about the path of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts could put bumps in the road for crypto prices. In December, the central bank signaled that although it was cutting rates a third time, it may do fewer rate cuts in 2025 than investors had anticipated. Historically, rate cuts have had a positive effect on bitcoin price while hikes have had a negative impact.
Bitcoin is up more than 3% since the start of the year. It posted a 120% gain for 2024.
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