Sam Altman pitched the Trump administration on taking a government stake in OpenAI. The same Sam Altman who got fired from his own company for reasons nobody will explain. The same Trump administration that just spent three months trying to figure out whether TikTok was a national security threat or just an app where teenagers dance. These are the two parties now discussing partial ownership of artificial intelligence technology. Sleep tight.
The government taking equity in a private AI startup represents a fascinating convergence of incompetence. On one side you have a federal bureaucracy that still uses fax machines. On the other you have a company that burns billions of dollars teaching computers to write mediocre poetry. The synergy writes itself. Picture a Senate subcommittee hearing where someone has to explain to Chuck Grassley what a large language model is. He's 91 years old. He thinks ChatGPT is a new kind of telephone.
Altman shared this idea in 2025, which means he walked into the White House and said "Give me taxpayer money for my science project." The pitch was probably fifteen minutes of buzzwords about national security and strategic advantage. Worked like a charm. The administration heard "China" three times and started writing checks. Nobody asked what happens when the government owns part of a company that keeps having executive meltdowns every six months. That's a problem for future incompetent people.
Retail traders are already salivating at whatever indirect exposure they can manufacture from this news. They'll buy shares in Microsoft because Microsoft invested in OpenAI, which means they're basically venture capitalists now. Genius moves. They've discovered a four-step chain of corporate investments and decided that's basically the same as owning AI. These are the same people who bought GameStop at $300 because they believed in the fundamentals of used disc resale.
The Trump administration taking a stake in OpenAI is what happens when two entities obsessed with attention discover they can share a spotlight. The only thing getting disrupted here is the traditional model of keeping government incompetence and Silicon Valley incompetence in separate buildings.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
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