If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
On Saturday night before the Oscars, Tower Bar was packed with entertainment and media names — but the most talked about diner wasn’t from a major studio or network.
Sam Altman — the OpenAI CEO named “Villain of the Year” a few months ago by Puck — was sitting in a corner banquette holding court with some tech bros.
Dining nearby was Jared Leto, while Disney president Dana Walden supped across the room at a table with new chairman of Disney Entertainment Television Debra OConnell and WME co-chairs Richard Weitz and Christian Muirhead.
Other guests who’d been strategically seated by the town’s top maître d’, Dimitri Dimitrov, included former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins and crisis PR queen Risa Heller.
New Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci was dining with New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh and family members before heading over to LACMA to put the finishing touches on his reimagined VF party, which this year slashed the guest list and inside press access.
(I tried to send Guiducci’s table dessert, but he took off too soon! And somehow I confusingly ended up eating two sundaes. Not a great pre-Oscars tux strategy.)
Either way, Altman — who reportedly made the VF party list — was the name on everyone’s lips on Saturday, and there was even a rumor that Elon Musk was also in the house.
Sources tell Page Six Hollywood that the AI exec has expressed interest in holding a few meetings around town with entertainment companies, and would be open to an acquisition if he could find the right fit. (And you thought Netflix wanting to buy Warner Bros. touched a nerve in the industry.)
Since bursting onto the scene in 2023, Altman hasn’t made many friends in Hollywood. Last year, OpenAI drew the ire of the biz with its video generation platform Sora that allowed users to generate videos rife with copyright infringement.
The company added guardrails and, soon after, inked a $1 billion licensing deal with Disney — landing a 10-figure investment plus access to Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars IP, including characters, costumes, props, vehicles and “iconic environments” (you mean like Tatooine or the Dagobah system?).
It seems Altman has at least made entreaties to Hollywood’s C suite. We’ve heard OpenAI’s attempts to get filmmakers and other creatives to use its tools have largely fallen flat — though that could also be because A-listers like Ben Affleck and Darren Aronofsky decided to make their own AI tech instead.
But like Jeff Bezos (in buying MGM) and the Ellison family (in buying both Paramount and Warner Bros.), Altman could be the next tech bro looking for his Hollywood close-up.
