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SA Sam Altman Sam Altman Entrepreneur and investor who has served as CEO of OpenAI since 2019, leading the company behind ChatGPT and its research on artificial general intelligence.

“I think everyone doing something this important to society deserves great scrutiny. I did see the movie trailer. It looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity and I really do support that. … I get why people have anxiety and also if they need to project that anxiety onto someone or have a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn't bother me.”

Halftime Report · September 2026

“I think everyone doing something this important to society deserves great scrutiny. I did see the movie trailer. It looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity and I really do support that. … I get why people have anxiety and also if they need to project that anxiety onto someone or have a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn't bother me.” — Sam Altman, Halftime Report

Context

Kate Rooney asked about public perception of Altman, citing an SNL Weekend Update segment and an upcoming movie about him. He accepts the scrutiny and shrugs off the mockery.

Transcript

Halftime Report Around 14:19 into the episode
Scott Wapner

that

Kate Rooney

we're saying. Okay.

Sam Altman

Well, what is the plan in hardware? And does it put more pressure to have an even better product if Mark Zuckerberg seems to have kind of gotten out of the gates first, even though maybe some of their stuff is still in the works? I am not worried about being first with new hardware. New hardware is very hard to do. Like new computing form factors come along very rarely. And the quality bar that we want to hit for something that you will love and really be a key part of the way you interface with AI, that's going to take a while and we're going to do that at a high level of quality. I also want to ask about the perception. We were just talking about the SNL weekend update. There is obviously a movie about you. I don't know if you've seen the trailer. There's some issues in terms of public perception. And just this thought that maybe you, maybe Dario Amade as leaders, don't have the best reputation right now. I mean, I think everyone doing something this important to society deserves great scrutiny. I did see the movie trailer. I mean, it looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity and I really do support that. So I hope they have a fun…

Scott Wapner

go in a second, but Greg Brockman, one of your co-founders, is in Washington, D.C. today.

Sam Altman

You were there at

Scott Wapner

the state dinner last night. What is your expectation of what's possible in DC and what have the conversations looked like behind the scenes, especially on international

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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