Interestingly this is exactly what all financial advice tends to actually warn about rather than encourage, that previous performance does not indicate future performance.
I suppose if they entered an established market and dominated it from the bootstraps that'd build a lot of trust in me. But others have pointed out, Sam went from dotcom fortune, to...vague question marks, to ycombinator, to openai. Not enough is clear to declare him wozniak, or even jobs, as many have been saying (despite investors calling him as such)
Sam altman is seemingly becoming the new post-fame elon musk: the type of person who could first afford the strategic safety net and PR to keep the act afloat.
The fact is that most people can't do what Sam Altman has done at all, so at the very least that past success makes him in one of the few percent of people who have a fighting chance.
It’s important to put those disclaimers in context though. The rules that mandated them came out before the era of index funds. Those disclaimers are specifically talking about fund managers. And it’s true that past performance at picking stocks does not indicate future performance of picking stocks. Out side of that context, past performance is almost always a strong indicator of future performance.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get some useful ideas about future performance from a person’s past results compared to other humans. There is no such effect in play here.
Otherwise, time for me to go beat Steph Curry in a shooting contest.
Of course there’s other reasons past performance is imperfect as a predictor. Fundamentals can change, or the past performance could have been luck. Maybe Steph’s luck will run out, or maybe this is the day he will get much worse at basketball, and I will easily win.