Sam Altman Swears He Just Needs Ten Trillion More Mana
San Francisco, CA — In yet another of the seemingly-endless funding rounds for software company, self-styled miracle factory, and future Enron-scale market atrocity OpenAI, known moron and CEO Sam Altman claimed that this time the company is not asking for money, but instead for mana.
“We just need, like, ten trillion more mana before we can start to really do stuff,” Altman said, regarding his company that has existed for eleven years and already raised $122 billion in its previous funding round alone when a significant amount of Americans choose between food and rent. “We promise, once we get ten trillion mana, we’re gonna go off. It’s gonna be so cool.”
Some investors were confused by Altman’s bizarre pivot to requiring mana instead of money–and no, they’ve checked, he is not referring to “MANA” the cryptocurrency, used for hilarious hype disaster metaverse Decentraland. Altman’s business is identically shady and identically based on lies and extremely intentional obfuscation, but our society has decided that it is more legitimate than both cryptocurrency and the metaverse, for some reason.
“I have money, but not Magic: The Gathering mana,” says SoftBank CEO and gormless rube Masayoshi Son. “At first we thought that just mailing Sam a bunch of basic lands would do the trick, but no. He needs, like, actual mana? And we weren’t sure how to make that. Right now I have my staff building life-sized replicas of Victory Chimes.”
“We’re gonna need to burn down a whole lot of forests, but it’ll be so worth it, I promise,” said Altman, whose objective lies can be observed by literally anyone who listens to his statements and then uses publicly-available information to check their veracity. “That’s how you get one green mana out of a Forest, right? You burn it down? That’s what ChatGPT told me.”
We reached out to industry reporters for their opinions.
“Money, mana, I wouldn’t trust Altman with a ham fucking sandwich if I could help it,” says only truthful AI industry reporter Ed Zitron. “Clammy Sammy definitely doesn’t know anything about Magic: The Gathering, and if he says he does, it’s because his stupid fucking app told him probably-wrong information about it. Did you know that hallucinations in AI models are a thing that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of overcoming? That they’re a mathematical inevitability? OpenAI researchers said so themselves. I wouldn’t even trust Sam to pilot a Simic Landfall deck. But yeah, sure, give that fucking worm ten trillion mana. That’ll work out just fine.”
Zitron’s sarcasm was so acidic that it melted the Spelltable game we were playing during the interview, to the point that we had to switch to using Convoke.
More conventional media outlets have a more positive outlook, however–and they have always been trustworthy when it comes to reporting on the tech industry and corporate interests in general, so surely they have done their research.
“What? Oh,” says New York Times publisher and chairman A.G. Sulzberger. “Yeah yeah, whatever Altman’s doing, I’m sure it’ll be amazing and make money forever. Go on, print it.”
After clarifying that I am not, in fact, a New York Times writer, and instead write for the much more journalistically courageous Commander’s Herald, he seemed confused. I clarified that I was here for an interview, and his eyes narrowed.
“Are you one of them, whatsit, trans women? ‘Cuz we don’t like those here at the NYT.”
After the resulting twenty-minute conversation that contained a number of microaggressions too high and egregious to be detailed here, I was at last able to ask Sulzberger about his publication’s coverage of Altman.
“Oh, sure, Sam can definitely get ten trillion mana,” Sulzberger said. “I mean, shit. We’re a fundamentally incurious publication that was once told by a longtime staffer and trans woman that our coverage is slanted heavily against trans women, and instead of doing a single goddamn thing about that, she just left and we haven’t changed at all. You think we’re gonna look at the numbers instead of just printing whatever Altman says uncritically? Come on. We’re the New York Times, kid. You think we have journalistic integrity?”
After being escorted out by Sulzberger’s security, even though I had initially been invited to perform this interview (via an email that to me read suspiciously like it was written by ChatGPT), I returned to Ed Zitron. Mainly because he seems cool and I’d love to hang out outside of work, but also because he deserves the last word:
“OpenAI fucking burns mana, and the spells they cast for you are only getting worse and worse,” he said. “I am preparing for the biggest I-told-you-so of all time, and Sammy’s gonna take the whole bloody mana economy with him. Mark my words.”
