At Davos, Sam Altman is a headliner, with star status scrutiny to match

In Davos, Sam Altman’s a star.

It may seem obvious, but it bears repeating—this time last year, ChatGPT was still pretty new to the public imagination (the chatbot had been released in late November) and Altman was the fresh-faced CEO of a juggernaut. Though he may have been en route to household name status by then, he still had a long way to go.

Now, this week, Altman’s a leading attraction at the World Economic Forum, following a year that’s been meteoric in every way possible. He’s soared, narrowly losing out on Time’s Person of the Year to Taylor Swift. And he’s cratered, getting temporarily booted from Open AI in November only to return in a blaze of glory.

Altman has star power now and, because he’s a star, he has more leeway than ever to opine on all sorts of topics (though, to be sure, AI underpins all that he’s talking about on Davos stages).

Altman spoke about elections, saying on a panel that, when it comes to how AI might affect elections, “the dangerous thing is not really what we understand, the existing images and videos, but it’s all the new stuff,” as reported by Bloomberg.

At an event run by Bloomberg, he offered words of caution about how much energy AI will use, and advocated for investment in renewable energy resources, even plugging nuclear fusion. Per Reuters, Altman told the audience that there has to be an energy “breakthrough” in order to meet the demands of a world increasingly run on AI. Altman also talked about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, saying that it’s coming in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

However, there’s at least one thing Altman doesn’t want to discuss.

Two months after his dramatic fire-rehire at Open AI, Altman is more or less through with publicly rehashing the episode. In a forum with Bloomberg’s Brad Stone, he pushed back on repeated questions about the five-day drama, asking: “Is [that] really what you want to spend their time on? The soap opera rather than, like, what AGI is going to do?”

Without taking anything away from AGI—the notion of a future, super-intelligent AI that can handle most tasks as well or better than humans—Term Sheet readers could be forgiven for finding more than just frivolous entertainment in the Altman drama. Altman’s influence in the startup world goes beyond OpenAI, which Fortune has extensively reported on. He’s cofounded the eyeball-scanning orb company WorldCoin, and through his fund, Hydrazine Capital, Altman has investments in all sorts of startups, including Helion Energy, Cruise, Boom Aviation, and Retro Biosciences. Indeed, some of the rumored reasons for Altman’s still-unexplained ousting revolved around reports that he was trying to raise billions of dollars for an AI chip startup and that he was also fundraising for a separate hardware company on the side.

OpenAI’s previous board of directors accused Altman of not being fully honest with them—whether that was related to Altman’s side ventures or to AGI, it seems like something worth knowing more about.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has been Altman’s staunchest ally, has also been taking Davos stages and did at least one talk in tandem with Altman. At one event, Nadella took the opportunity to reiterate his faith in Altman and in Open AI, saying: “I'm comfortable. I have no issues with any structure."

But people love a soap opera (myself included), and it doesn’t seem likely that questions about Open AI’s hectic five days will go away anytime soon. Such is the life of a star, I suppose.

One scoop…Onbe, a payments company, has hired advisors to find a buyer, according to three banking and venture executives. Onbe is the former Wirecard North America that merged with daVinci Payments in 2020 and then, in 2021, changed its name to Onbe. The company could sell for more than $2 billion, people said. Investors include Centerbridge Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Silversmith Capital Partners, MissionOG, and Nyca Partners. Onbe, BCV, Silversmith, and MissionOG did not return messages for comment. Centerbridge and Nyca declined to comment. —Luisa Beltran

Two scoops…M12, Microsoft’s in-house VC firm, now has a healthy $275 million at its disposal this fiscal year. It’s a number that’s been closely guarded by the software giant until now, and it’s an upgrade—previously M12 has invested between $150 million to $250 million each year. —Rachyl Jones

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com