- Sam Altman has revised his opinion on the seriousness of antisemitism.
- The OpenAI CEO said he was “totally wrong” about how bad the problem actually was.
- “I still don’t understand it, really. Or know what to do about it,” Altman said in an X post.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he has badly underestimated how extensive the problem of antisemitism is in the US.
“For a long time I said that antisemitism, particularly on the American left, was not as bad as people claimed,” Sam Altman wrote in an X post on Thursday. “I’d like to just state that I was totally wrong.”
Altman, who is of Jewish descent, went on to express his confusion and frustration at the situation in his post.
“I still don’t understand it, really. Or know what to do about it. But it is so fucked,” he wrote.
Altman isn’t the only business executive to have voiced his opinion on the issue.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has styled himself as the most vocal critic of college campuses in the US, and their response to the Israel-Hamas war. The Harvard alumnus has slammed his alma mater and other colleges for what he believes to be a rise in antisemitism on campuses.
This week, politicians and corporate titans have slammed the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania over their approaches toward on-campus antisemitism.
The three presidents attended a congressional hearing about on-campus antisemitism on Tuesday, where they were repeatedly asked if calling for the genocide of Jews violates their universities’ rules on bullying and harassment.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Harvard’s Claudine Gay said at the hearing.
The MIT and University of Pennsylvania presidents Sally Kornbluth and Liz Magill gave similar answers when asked the same question.
“Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context,” Ackman wrote on X on Tuesday.
Representatives for Altman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
