At roughly 3:45 a.m. on Friday, April 10, a twenty-year-old Texas resident threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco home; it struck the gate, ignited briefly, and was extinguished before spreading. [1] By Sunday morning, the same house was targeted again — a single gunshot, according to SFPD filings and San Francisco Standard reporting, two days after the first incident. [2] Investigators recovered a list of AI-CEO home addresses and kerosene from the first suspect's vehicle. The suspect had flown from Texas to San Francisco the day of the first attack.

The timing is the story the security tape cannot tell by itself. The New Yorker published a long-form Altman profile that week describing, per CFO pushback, a "serial liar" with "secret deals" — a piece already circulating in Valley Slack channels before the first molotov. [3] The paper's April 17 account of Mills signing Maine's first-in-nation data center moratorium framed the political cost of AI infrastructure; the molotov was the physical one, days ahead. On April 16, OpenAI extended its ad pilot to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The Hyper acquisition by Amex closed out the agentic-commerce category the same week.

Fortune named "anti-AI data center sentiment" as a motive investigators are pursuing; the Justice Department has not charged the second incident's suspect as of Saturday morning. [4] What the arc shows is convergence. The profile, the attacks, the state law, the international monetization note — the week did not file any single story, but it filed one shape. A founder whose name had, through 2025, signified the future arrived at the week where the future began sending him bills from every direction at once: the gate, the magazine, the bill Mills signed, and the release note the company shipped abroad while its CEO's street stayed cordoned off.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing