This superhero narrative is the secret engine of nearly each ebook beloved by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, a founder of Uber, was a devotee of Ayn Rand, whose heroes are at struggle with society. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was a childhood fan of “Star Trek,” the place Captain Kirk made each choice and took cost of each touchdown get together. Peter Thiel, the enterprise capitalist who backed Donald J. Trump in 2016, loves “The Lord of the Rings,” an epic story the place a handful of heroes save the world. Mr. Thiel’s company names (Palantir, Mithril, Valar) are taken from the story.

Mr. Altman, to his credit score, has endorsed a large studying checklist that goes past books written by his associates in Silicon Valley, like Mr. Thiel. He advisable one other Valley favourite, Isaac Asimov’s “Basis” science fiction sequence, which is as soon as once more about how a charismatic and farseeing savant and his principally male acolytes can save everybody, on this case 25 million planets.

However the path to changing into a real-life Gandalf or Captain Picard is strewn with peril.

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos modeled herself on Mr. Jobs. When she couldn’t get her blood-testing expertise to work, she merely pretended it did. Adam Neumann promised to reinvent the workplace expertise with WeWork. It declared chapter two weeks in the past, though Mr. Neumann did handle to grow to be wealthy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the vibrant promise of cryptocurrency, might be sentenced in March for fraud. Elon Musk has not helped his status or his checking account by shopping for Twitter, now known as X.

For Mr. Altman, this previous weekend could have been a private peak. For all the discuss of A.I. taking jobs, he all of the sudden turned the one important individual in all expertise. A submit on X by Eric Schmidt, the former chief government of Google, captured some of the temper, and by no means thoughts that Google is in a fierce competitors with OpenAI:

“Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He constructed an organization from nothing to $90 Billion in worth, and adjusted our collective world without end. I can’t wait to see what he does subsequent. I, and billions of individuals, will profit from his future work — it’s going to be merely unimaginable.”

That is Jobs-level reward. Maybe correctly, Mr. Altman scorned all the presents he was attending to fund his subsequent start-up. Microsoft, the greatest investor in OpenAI, introduced late Sunday that he could be coming there. He’ll work for others now.