OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman appeared on CNBC with Nvidia’s CEO Jenson Huang to discuss Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI.
As seen below, Altman said: “The scale of this project, you know, a $100 billion is a small dent in it, and the numbers are also like, they’re missing the story of what this infrastructure is capable of doing.
“Like, 10 gigawatts of compute, again, easy to throw around numbers like that, but the amount of work it takes to build that out, the size and scale of these like, you know, multi-square-miled, gigantic things, and the complexity of every level of the supply chain, and then what that amount of brain power, which does not exist today, can do already today, will do as the models get better. Like, this is the real deal. This is the thing people have been waiting for.”
These guys have clearly convinced themselves what they’re doing is important beyond human comprehension but are utterly incapable of communicating what it is. In another era we’d call it a pyramid scheme or just idolatry. pic.twitter.com/Hm56YfIbeC
— Lee Hepner (@LeeHepner) September 23, 2025
Altman added: “The stuff that will come out of this super brain will be remarkable in a way that we don’t know how to think about yet.”
When the CNBC host responded, “‘$100 billion is a small dent,’ [you] know you’re starting to sound like President Trump,” all three executives laughed.
[Note: Nvidia is also investing $5 billion in Intel, the semiconductor manufacturing company that the U.S. federal government just invested in, taking a10 percent stake. The Trump administration has been criticized (by both Democrats and Republicans) for emulating communist countries like China and Russia for taking ownership of companies.]
Lee Hepner, a California-based antitrust lawyer and Senior Legal Counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, responded to the CNBC conversation on social media.
He wrote: “These guys have clearly convinced themselves what they’re doing is important beyond human comprehension but are utterly incapable of communicating what it is. In another era we’d call it a pyramid scheme or just idolatry.”
Note: The American Economic Liberties Project was founded in 2020 and headed by Sarah Miller, former Senior Advisor to the Chair and Chief of Staff at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under Chair Lina Khan.
Hepner added: “I mean it’s hilarious. These are the leading minds of the entire AI industry? This is the big old pitch for why they need trillions more investment? This is what’s driving the S&P 500?”
Hepner wrote of OpenAI’s President: “Brockman at least tries to put it in real terms: ‘Clearly you want an agent who is going to do work for you proactively, be able to organize your calendar.’ It’s the ‘clearly’ that gets me. They want to burn trillions of dollars for a calendar organizer?”
Journalist David Z. Morris, former Chief Insights Columnist at CoinDesk and author of the book ‘Stealing the Future: SBF and Elite Fraud’, agrees with Hepner.
Morris replied: “The most risible part of all of this is the claim that this amount of ‘brainpower’ ‘doesn’t exist today.’ [Expletive] it’s called the human population, you just happen to fear and hate and want to disinvest from it.”
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