I've observed a correlation between people who place a lot of emphasis on not being a chump and the probability that a person will pursue marginal benefits at significant cost to others (including myself). I think it's because both behaviors are rooted in a similar world view and economic model.

Specifically for this context, if Musk and Altman conspired to do wrong by someone, it would be much easier to 'quietly beat them with a $5 wrench' than to engineer and construct OpenAI to publicly serve some cold dish. That's not to say it's all warm and fuzzy, but businesses that can succeed on aligned interests are better than those that seek cut throat markets.

Sounds like we need a Co-founder basic income?

That's a fantastic idea. We could give it a special name to avoid confusion. How about "salary"?

You often hear about founder salaries being set intentionally low by VCs to keep founders hungry.

While I don't dispute the power of stress and pressure to light a fire under someone's ass, I don't think it should come in the form of a person's livelihood.

For example, it's not hard to imagine founder(s) that have been working for years on something with no pay, putting them far behind their traditionally-employed peers. They may even have family obligations on top of that. Proceeding to then pay them low wages in the interest of motivation isn't exactly the best idea.

Granted, I do tend to agree with the ethos of having the founder being the lowest-paid employee in the company. Ideally that just ensures everyone else is paid really, really well.

We've kind of had the hat-trick of weasely-ness going on recently. They get overworked, underpaid, and then the promise of a big payout at the end is diluted away by investors who were barely involved beyond sloshing a bunch of other people's money in their general direction.

I don't like industries that institutionalize the consumption of individuals enthusiasm or altruism. We've essentially lost medicine to the latter and it sucks to see the startup scene consumed by the former.

> Greg asked me questions for the first half of the drive back to San Francisco, then declared he was in, and started planning logistics for the rest of the drive.

I think he took on the risk when he bought into it.

But yeah.