Silicon Valley was where people came to build empires, and you didn’t build an empire by working forty hours a week. But his real gift as an entrepreneur was his power to persuade others of his authority. He had drawn the admiration of mentors, from his high school principal to Y Combinator’s Graham and Livingston to Peter Thiel, along with thousands of start-up founders. But Altman also had an underlying dissonance: a brilliant mind driven to protect the world that was also emotionally distant from the regular people he sought to save.
