When we first met, in early 2023, Ray went on about how fishy these all were. He had a theory about why Sam had thrown money around the way he had: Sam was buying himself some friends. “For the first time in his life, everyone ignores the fact that he’s a fucking weirdo,” said Ray. As an example, he cited the dollars Sam had invested in artificial intelligence companies. “He gave five hundred million bucks to this thing called Anthropic,” said Ray. “It’s just a bunch of people with an idea. Nothing.” A few weeks later, Google and Spark Capital and a few other companies invested $450 million in
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