The San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was struck by gunfire recently, and regardless of how you feel about the guy, that should concern you.
Let's start with the obvious: shooting at someone's house is a serious crime. Full stop. Whether the target is a billionaire tech CEO or anyone else in this city, gunfire in a residential neighborhood is a public safety issue that affects everyone nearby. We don't get to wave that away because the victim happens to be polarizing.
But wave it away is exactly what San Francisco did. The online reaction was a masterclass in performative indifference. As one local put it with deadpan delivery: "Horrible. Looks like more rain coming later this week." Another SF resident offered: "Very sad. Anyone know any good air fryer salmon recipes?" The collective shrug was deafening.
Look, we get it. Altman isn't exactly a sympathetic figure to a lot of people right now. OpenAI's transformation from nonprofit to effectively a for-profit juggernaut has rubbed plenty of folks the wrong way, and the broader anxieties about AI aren't exactly unfounded. One resident summed up the mood bluntly: "Remember guys, it's only class warfare when the working class participate."
That's a sharp line. It's also a dangerous sentiment to normalize.
Here's the thing The Dissent keeps coming back to: you don't get to pick and choose when law and order matter. Either we're a city that takes gun violence seriously or we're not. Either property rights and personal safety apply to everyone or they apply to no one. The same folks cheering this on would — rightly — be furious if bullets hit their home and Twitter collectively yawned.
SFPD needs to investigate this aggressively and publicly. Not because Altman is important, but because the principle is. San Francisco's already got a reputation as a city where criminals operate with impunity. A high-profile shooting that gets treated as a punchline only reinforces that narrative.
You can think OpenAI is reckless. You can think Altman is overhyped. You can think billionaires should pay more taxes. None of that makes shooting at someone's house acceptable — or funny.



