After The New Yorker called him out, Paul Graham responded: Sam was not pushed out by YC.

BlockBeatNews · 2026-04-07T06:36:48+00:00

Paul Graham responded to The New Yorker’s controversy about Sam Altman, emphasizing that Sam’s departure from Y Combinator was not due to distrust but a matter of choice. He also clarified that his previous comments about Sam were merely praise for his resilience and carried no negative connotations.

BlockBeatNews

2026-04-07 06:36:48

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According to 1M AI News monitoring, after being mentioned by name in a long-form investigative piece in The New Yorker, Paul Graham posted two responses related to the controversy involving Sam Altman. First, he pushed back on the article’s narrative about Sam leaving Y Combinator. The New Yorker claimed that, privately, Graham had long been clear that Sam being removed from YC at the time was due to the partners’ lack of trust in him; Graham said that was not the case, reiterating that back then it wasn’t a YC “fire/remove” of Sam, but rather a request that he choose between YC and OpenAI.

Graham also separately responded to the famous old quote the report brought up again—“Airdrop Sam onto the cannibal island, and five years later he’ll become king.” The New Yorker placed this line in the context of the article’s broader discussion of Sam’s willpower, power style, and credibility controversies; Graham, meanwhile, said the line was originally only meant to show that Sam has “resilience, adaptability, and decisiveness,” and carried no “sinister” meaning.

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