In 2019, Leoncio Alonso González de Gregorio y Álvarez de Toledo, the 22nd Duke of Medina Sidonia, stormed into his late mother's palace on the Andalusian coast of Spain.

In a video he posted on YouTube marking the occasion, the Duke, tall and silver-haired, strides triumphantly through the Ambassador Room — a grand hall nearly 33 yards long, lined with oil paintings by the likes of Velázquez's master, Francisco Pacheco. In happier times, the room had been used for receiving dignitaries who visited the Duke's mother, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo. Celebrated as the "Red Duchess," Luisa Isabel was a socialist-minded, fascism-battling aristocrat beloved by ordinary Spaniards. But now, 11 years after she had cut Leonicio and his siblings out of their inheritance, the Duke had arrived at the palace to lay claim to a national treasure he considered his by birthright.

"At last, I'm at home after many decades away," Leoncio proclaims in the video.

The treasure, known as the Archive of Medina-Sidonia, was housed in the palace's attic. A collection of 6 million documents, it spans nearly a millennium of Spanish imperial history. Within its pages lie the secrets of the kings, dukes, and explorers of medieval Spain. Luisa Isabel, who had spent the last two decades of her life cataloging the archive, believed it proved that Arab Andalusians, not Christopher Columbus, had discovered America. Perhaps the most important privately held archive in Europe, it is valued at over $60 million, though historians who have studied it consider it priceless.

Luisa Isabel, who'd been imprisoned under the regime of dictator Francisco Franco, believed the archive should pass to the people. "I have inherited this legacy, which is legally mine," she once declared. "But morally, it belongs to everyone." In her will, Luisa Isabel left only 743,000 euros to Leoncio and his siblings, Pilar and Gabriel. The bulk of the estate — including the archives — would be controlled by Liliane Dahlmann, Luisa Isabel's lover and longtime secretary, whom the Duchess had married on her deathbed.

What ensued was a bitter legal battle that would shatter the family, captivate Spanish society, and throw the fate of the archive into doubt. Leoncio's homecoming video was a declaration of war. Flouting a court ruling that barred him and his siblings from living in the palace, he had decided to move back into his ancestral home — even though it was legally occupied by Liliane, his mother's widow. "There's a lot of tension," says Gabriel, the black sheep of the family. "They barely talk to one another, enter and leave through separate doors, and rarely bump into one another." To drive home his disputed claim, Leoncio made a point of interrupting weekly palace tours. "Welcome to my house!" he would greet groups of startled tourists. "Here, they only manipulate the truth."

Liliane, ensconced upstairs with the archive she had been charged with safeguarding, kept her silence. At times it must have seemed that the family's inheritance, passed down through the generations and now entrusted to her care, was cursed. "Sometimes you don't choose your destiny, it chooses you," she once said. "Personally, these past few years have been exceedingly difficult — the stuff of nightmares."

The family appeared to start off happily enough. In 1955, only 18 years old and already pregnant with Leoncio, Luisa Isabel married José Leoncio González de Gregorio, a nobleman from Soria. Photographs from the time show the new Duchess smiling in a black ankle-length dress, her long hair framing her tiny face and her lips brightened with lipstick. Standing beside her, José Leoncio appears tall, athletic, and handsome.

In reality, Luisa Isabel and José Leoncio couldn't have made a more ill-suited couple. Her ancestors had commanded Spanish armadas, served as prime minister, and owned vast swathes of southern Spain. Her parents had fled the country during the Spanish Civil War. Her new husband, by contrast, was a die-hard conservative who supported Franco's dictatorship. Luisa Isabel loved the night life. José Leoncio, a man of the countryside, disliked high society nearly as much as the radical ideals that would soon claim his wife.

During their brief union, the couple had three children in quick succession: Leoncio in 1956, Pilar in 1957, and Gabriel in 1958. But the Duchess never seemed to take to the role of mother. After giving birth to Gabriel, family lore has it that she handed him to the nurses and declared she had fulfilled her role as a woman. The moment also marked the end of her marriage. Within the year, she had separated from José Leoncio and began to spend long stretches in Paris, where she mingled with Simone de Beauvoir and other leading intellectuals. Her children remained behind in Madrid, where they were left in the care of Luisa Isabel's grandmother. "She rarely came to visit," Gabriel recalls.

One day, when Gabriel was 6 or 7, his mother appeared at the door. Gone were her elegant dresses and long hair. Wafer thin, Luisa Isabel now sported men's trousers and short-cropped hair. There were rumors she was sleeping with women. "Someone in the household said she was our mother," Gabriel recalls. "But for us, she looked like the boy who worked at the local grocery." Leoncio was distraught. "You're not my mother!" he cried.

The change in Luisa Isabel ran deeper than fashion. In 1964, the Duchess led a protest march of fishermen in Sanlúcar. Her noble pedigree gave her a measure of protection to speak out against Franco. "This privileged aristocrat had a rebellious spirit," as one newspaper put it. Her reputation was further cemented in 1967, when she stood up for a group of protesters whose homes had been rendered radioactive after an American nuclear bomber crashed over the small fishing village of Palomares. The protesters, she told soldiers dispatched by the regime, "are here only for justice, and they are here with me." She then led the group to a bar at the village's main square for a round of cold beers.

Arrested and thrown in prison for a year, the Duchess kept up the fight from her miserable, rat-infested cell. She wrote letters and articles denouncing the conditions in Spanish prisons. A novel she authored about suffering farm workers called "The Strike," which she had managed to smuggle into France, prompted the government to threaten her with a 10-year sentence for slander. In April 1970, a few months after her release, the Duchess escaped to France disguised as a man. "I remember putting the hat and the mustache on her," recalls Julia Franco, a longtime family employee.

During her exile, José Leoncio seized on her political dissidence to secure custody of the children. "The role of being a mother slipped away from her," Pilar recalls. According to Gabriel, he and his siblings were at their father's mercy. "He was determined to redirect our lives, banning the staff from passing her calls or letters on to us," he says. The children, by birth, were nobility. But their lives felt anything but noble.

"The Red Duchess Returns" blared a headline in El Pais, a national newspaper, in 1976. Franco had died, paving the way for Spain's first open elections in four decades and the safe return of Spanish dissidents. Luisa Isabel moved into the palace at Sanlúcar, where she held court each evening surrounded by famous actors, foreign journalists, and celebrated academics. No longer closeted about her sexuality, she came across like a Spanish version of Sid Vicious. "She was punky, with short, spiky hair and worn-out clothing," recalls Miguel "El Capi" Arenas, who lived with the Duchess in the early 1980s.

By day, Luisa Isabel devoted herself to organizing the archives. Often rising at 6 in the morning, she would sequester herself in the attic among stacks of dusty documents, chain-smoking cigarettes — two packs a day — and barely eating. She spent years cataloging the papers in jaundiced folders, tying them up with string and developing a knack for deciphering their Gothic cursive handwriting, with all its loops and ligatures. Establishing herself as an amateur historian, she published a dozen books, including "It Wasn't Us," her reappraisal of Columbus published on the 500th anniversary of his arrival in America. Historians came to admire her patience and diligence. "She did a magnificent job with very few resources," says Juan Luis Albentosa, chief archivist of the Franciscan Library in Murcia. "She had no state support back then, nor any formal training."

The Duchess had first encountered the papers in the late 1950s in a storage tunnel at her family home in Madrid and transported them to the palace in Sanlúcar in the back of a lorry. While it wasn't unusual for noble families to maintain private archives, this one encompassed the unwritten history of Spain itself. The archive contained not only the records of various aristocratic families, but also receipts signed by the painter Diego Velázquez, primary sources about the Spanish Armada, and municipal records from Palos de la Frontera, the village from which Columbus set sail in 1492.

The Duchess both embraced and defied her status as an aristocrat. She believed the Archive of Medina-Sidonia belonged to the public — but only after she was no longer alive to claim it. "She was a traditionalist," her nephew, Alfonso Maura, tells me. "How could she spend all those years working on the family archives and not be?" Andres Martinez, a historian and friend of the Duchess, casts her contradictory nature in more poetic terms. "You can't jump out of your own shadow," he says.

As Luisa Isabel devoted her days to the archive and her nights to her soirees, her children saw her only occasionally. To the Duchess, they were reminders of their father — and of the world of entitlement she had devoted her life to rejecting. In 1977, a year after her return to Spain, she wrote to the director general of the Spanish National Heritage Board to request that the palace and its contents, including the archives, be registered as protected public goods, to "prevent losing what belongs to everyone."

"My family's wealth isn't important, and my children don't seem interested in preserving our artistic heritage, although they enjoy it," she wrote. By the following year, the request had been granted. The most important and valuable asset of Medina-Sidonia's ancestral heritage was now under the protection of the state.

In Gabriel's view, "the moment that marked our disunion" occurred in 1982 — the day Leoncio married his first wife, a Catalonian aristocrat named María Montserrat Viñamata y Martorell. It was at the wedding that Liliane Dahlmann, one of the bridesmaids, entered Luisa Isabel's life.

The Duchess noticed Liliane immediately. Tall and blonde and 20 years Luisa Isabel's junior, Liliane had moved from Germany to Barcelona as a girl. "I'll make her mine," the Duchess told her friend Capi Arenas during the reception. Julia Franco, who was also in attendance, recalls that the Duchess and Liliane "couldn't take their eyes off each other."

Before long, Liliane had moved into the palace, where she served as Luisa Isabel's secretary. The relationship mellowed the Duchess. Gone were the wild parties and the bohemian friends crashing at the palace for months on end; Luisa Isabel became quieter and more dedicated to the archives. "They were always together," her friend Andres Martinez recalls. "I couldn't get the Duchess alone, ever." Luisa Isabel's children were also suspicious. "Liliane was always in my mother's ear, trying to make us look bad," Pillar says.

The children also began to fight among themselves. As the eldest, Leoncio had a role in deciding which family titles went to whom. Gabriel claims they had an understanding that he would be named Duke of Montalto and Aragon, and that Leoncio had changed his mind.

"I'm inclined to stop the progressive scattering of our family titles," Leoncio wrote in a letter to his brother, rationalizing the decision. Since the family could no longer claim economic or political power, he said, "moral and historical integrity is all we have left."

Pilar was next. In 1993, King Juan Carlos I had named her Duchess of Fernandina. Now, Leoncio maintained that the title should have gone to his son. He launched a battle in the Spanish courts, stripping his sister of her noble name and privileges.

Leoncio also squabbled with his mother over the estate of her grandmother, who had left the children an inheritance "worth millions of euros," according to Gabriel. But as the estate's administrator, the Duchess had spent much of the money. In a letter to his mother, Leoncio protested this "robbery," complaining that he had received no financial help after his marriage and the birth of his son. He barely mentioned Pilar and Gabriel. The Duchess, in a scathing reply, denounced Leoncio as "weaker" than she had "ever imagined."

Gabriel had considered himself and Leoncio thick as thieves; they had lived together during their university days in Madrid and always looked after each other. Now, he felt that Leoncio was only looking out for himself. Pilar agreed. "My older brother tried to keep everything for himself and push us out," she says.

Gabriel and Pilar took the nuclear option. In 1989, they successfully sued their mother over the misspent money. In retaliation, the Duchess banned them from the palace.

Over the ensuing years, the Duchess sold off various tracts of land and other assets, reinvesting the money in the palace, and took steps to ensure that none of the children would have any power over the archives. In 1990, she transferred ownership of the palace and the archives to a new organization she founded, the Casa Medina Sidonia Foundation. And in 2005, she amended the foundation's statutes to ensure that, upon her death, Liliane would take over as president.

Three years later, on the night the Duchess died — March 7, 2008 — mourners filled the Salon of Columns, a vast room in the palace crafted by American artisans provided to the family by the 16th-century conquistador Hernán Cortés. Gabriel arrived at around 10 o'clock at night. At age 50, he and his mother hadn't spoken in 20 years. Leoncio and Pilar were already there. The greetings between them were civil but not warm.

There were whispers about how the Duchess had carried out one final snub of her children. Just 11 hours before her death, she had married Liliane in a civil ceremony. Details of the wedding were hush-hush, but it granted Liliane legal control of the palace — and the archives.

Gabriel had arrived at the palace with a somewhat macabre mission in mind. He'd brought a camera with him, and he planned to capture an image of his mother's corpse, just as he'd done when his father had died a month earlier. He wasn't sure where this impulse came from. Perhaps, after years of animosity and neglect, he wanted proof his parents were really gone for good.

Stepping away from the mourners, Gabriel entered the room where the Duchess lay in a casket. She was "deteriorated, stiff," he recalls. He felt no despair, no sense of grief. He took the camera from his pocket and held it over her body. As he did, others in the room protested. Gabriel took the picture anyway. "He had the right to take a photo of her," says his friend Íñigo Ramírez de Haro, an author and playwright who accompanied Gabriel that night. "He was her son, after all."

Alerted to what was happening, Leoncio suddenly appeared and began chasing his brother around the room. "He asked me to delete the photo," Gabriel recalls. It was a regression to youth, two middle-aged men sparring like adolescents in their mother's grand house. It was also a sign of the quarrels to come.

At first, the siblings worked in concert to challenge their mother's will. In court, they cited a provision of Spanish law mandating that a person's descendants have a right to two-thirds of an estate, regardless of the deceased's wishes. "I'm not surprised by any of this," Gabriel told a reporter at the time. "My mother made it clear that she was going to fuck us."

The court agreed. By transferring the vast majority of her wealth — the palace and its contents, including the archives — to the foundation, the Duchess had exceeded the portion of her estate she was legally allowed to bequeath to non-heirs. The foundation was ordered to pay 27 million euros to the children as compensation. There was only one problem: The foundation had nowhere near that much money, and, as a national heritage site, none of it could be sold.

To further complicate matters, Leoncio wasn't satisfied with the ruling. He was after something more than money. As duke, he believed he should be responsible for the palace, the archives, and the family legacy. "Leoncio Alonso wasn't happy with this solution because it meant giving up his family's property, and he didn't want to be remembered as the first Duke of Medina Sidonia to allow this," Eduardo Ferreiro, Leoncio's lawyer, said at the time.

Leoncio appealed the ruling and won. But the victory proved pyrrhic. The higher court ruled that he and his siblings would become part owners of the palace and its treasures — though without any power over its administration, any right to distribute its contents, or any privilege to reside there. Liliane, the court added, could continue to live in the palace. The siblings were effectively owners of everything, and of nothing.

Infuriated, Leoncio decided to defy the court's ruling and take matters into his own hands. He moved into the palace, effectively becoming housemates with his mother's widow. "Cohabitation is uncomfortable," he told a reporter. "However, the house is big."

Things got messy, fast. A newspaper reported that Montserrat Viñamata, Leoncio's first wife, had become romantically involved with Liliane, whom she had known since their university days in Barcelona. Viñamata denied the rumor: "Whoever has insinuated this has done me a lot of damage," she told a local newspaper.

In 2023, Leoncio ratcheted up the dispute. He accused Liliane of taking money from his mother's estate. Liliane denied the charge, arguing that Leoncio was smearing her name in an effort to remove her as president of the foundation so he could take over in her place. Both of them declined requests to speak with me.

Earlier this year, a judge found Liliane guilty of misappropriating funds. She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to repay 280,000 euros. Her appeal is due to be heard by Spain's supreme court.

On a hot morning last summer, I sit down with Gabriel at a busy café terrace in Madrid. Dressed in navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt, collar up, he looks every inch the aristocrat. Slim, with wavy gray hair, he's the kind of well-read man who sprinkles his conversations with quotes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. He also takes after his mother. It's as if his obsession with her betrayal has so boiled within him that it now emanates from his very physicality. He has her rosy cheeks, her birdish eyes, her same stubborn drive.

Gabriel, divorced and childless, seems caught in a perpetual struggle to find his place in the world. He has a habit of talking in circles, though he always returns to the topic of how his family has been torn apart. "I've been at cafés with him," says a close family member, "and suddenly he'll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother."

His mother, he tells me, "never wanted to have any relationship with us. Above all, she saw us as a threat to the free disposal of her wealth." He claims he wants to mediate between his siblings and Liliane. "I see the foundation as running like a business," he says. "What interests me is that it's run well, not who runs it." But even those closest to him have trouble discerning his true intentions. "Gabriel's views on all this change — depending on how he wakes up in the morning," says his good friend and lawyer, Javier Timmermans.

Pilar, for her part, sees the family drama as integral to both brothers' emotional makeup. Gabriel "seems to be searching for headlines rather than solutions," she says, while Leoncio is "just interested in defending his claims" as the first-born son.

Pilar, a writer and a socialite, inherited her mother's flair for culture: One paper called her "possibly the most elegant woman in Spanish high society." If her brothers remain bent on getting justice, she's more interested in closure. "All that sensationalism doesn't matter," she says. "That might be fine for making a soap opera if they want, but solving the archives issue doesn't have to depend on that."

Pilar is the first to admit that she has good reason to seek a settlement. She has inherited her father's residence in central Spain, the González de Gregorio Palace, and she has taken to referring to it as her vampire because it sucks up all her money. "I would be lying if I said I didn't want to resolve this situation because I need to," she says.

Unfortunately for Pilar and her brothers, their father's estate is proving every bit as thorny as their mother's. A half-sister whom their father never recognized has come forward to demand a share of his estate, using the same provision of Spanish inheritance law that they themselves deployed against the foundation. In October, a court ordered Pilar and her brothers to pay the half-sister a sum of more than $1 million. Gabriel now fears they might be forced to auction off the rights to the archive to private bidders — a desperate measure to cover their spiraling debts. If that were to happen, the children would finally be separated from the archive, just as the Duchess had wanted.

A few months after meeting with Gabriel, I travel to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to see the Archive of Medina Sidonia for myself.

Walking through a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets in the city center, I pass rows of simple white houses. Some of the facades are crumbling like stale bread; others are as pristine as a Hollywood smile. The whitewashed palace looms above the city, just as the family's thousand-year legacy has loomed over the children for their entire lives.

Past the sprawling Ambassador's Room where the Duke had filmed his triumphant return, I climb a flight of stairs to the attic. The Investigator's Room smells sweet and woody. A faint chill hangs in the air, and bright sunlight casts shadows across the high shelves lined with books. There I find Liliane, quietly tapping away on her laptop.

In an email to me, Liliane had accepted my request to visit the archive, but said she wouldn't comment on any legal matters, citing past experiences when she felt her words had been twisted. Her position on the archive, echoing that of the late Duchess, is that it belongs in public hands. "They are the only ones who, today, can guarantee its maintenance and preservation, as required in a technological world," she wrote, adding that "knowledge of the past is indispensable for moving forward in all aspects of human life."

True to her word, Liliane sits at the table beside me in silence while I study the archive. After several hours, she abruptly leaves without uttering a word.

I'm handed an accountant's ledger, which indexes the documents in the archive, the descriptions scribbled in the margins in the Duchess's spidery handwriting. I ask for a diary of the Almadraba — the famous local fishing season held every May for the past 3,000 years. The diary dates back to 1550, comprising a nearly indecipherable tabulation of the number of fish caught, and the money made in each village.

Sitting with the nearly 500-year-old document in the dim light of the library, I'm reminded that only a tiny part of the collection has been digitized. The history it contains is almost entirely physical. A fire, or a robbery, could cause the documents to disappear forever.

The most viable resolution is for either the state or a major cultural institution to step in and buy the estate from the siblings, turning it into a state-owned asset and ensuring the proper management and preservation of the archives. But that would cost a lot of money — and thanks to the Duchess, the government already has a role in the foundation's administration, providing resources and guidance. And so the feud rages on, with the children clinging to the legacy their mother never wanted them to have. Leoncio and Liliane continue to live in separate wings of the palace, each imprisoned by the limbo to which Spanish law, and their intertwined fate, have condemned them. Gabriel remains consumed by his vendetta against their mother, and Pilar remains locked in battle with the rest of the family. The Duchess, with her relentless dedication to the archive and her disregard for her own children, left them with an acrimonious and bitter future. They had succeeded at gaining part ownership of her estate. But what they'd won seems more like a share in her disdain.

Matthew Bremner is a writer based in Spain.

It's been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon. Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in his black turtleneck in 1998. Elon Musk set his sights on Mars in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg emerged from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley, we have Sam Altman.

The cofounder and CEO of the chatbot pioneer OpenAI stands at the center of what's shaping up to be a trillion-dollar restructuring of the global economy. His image — boyishly earnest, chronically monotonic, carelessly coiffed — is a throwback to the low-charisma, high-intelligence nerd kings of Silicon Valley's glory days. And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word. In September, when Altman went on a podcast called "How I Write" and mentioned his love of pens from Uniball and Muji, his genius life hack ignited the internet. "OpenAI's CEO only uses 2 types of pens to take notes," Fortune reported — with a video of the podcast.

It's easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman's table. But the notability of Altman's notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier. His ideas on productivity and entrepreneurship — not to mention everything from his take on science fiction to his choice of vitamins — have become salient not just to the worlds of tech and business, but to the broader culture. The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on his transition team. And have you noticed that a lot of tech bros are starting to wear sweaters with the sleeves rolled up? A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.

But the attention to Altman's pen preferences raises a larger question: What does his mindset ultimately mean for the rest of us? How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?

To answer that question, I've spent weeks taking a Talmudic dive into the Gospel According to Sam Altman. I've pored over hundreds of thousands of words he's uttered in blog posts, conference speeches, and classroom appearances. I've dipped into a decade's worth of interviews he's given — maybe 40 hours or so. I won't claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon. But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick. The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres. The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought. Distill the past three decades of tech culture and business practice into a super-soldier serum, inject it into the nearest scrawny, pale arm, and you get Sam Altman — Captain Silicon Valley, defender of the faith.

Let's start with the vibes. Listening to Altman for hours on end, I came away thinking that he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unlike Jobs, who bestrode the stage at Apple events dropping one-more-things like a modern-day Prometheus, Altman doesn't spew ego everywhere. In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back. He often starts his sentences with "so," his affect as flat as his native Midwest. He also has a Midwesterner's amiability, somehow seeming to agree with the premise of almost any question, no matter how idiotic. When Joe Rogan asked Altman whether he thinks AI would one day be able, via brain chips, to edit human personalities to be less macho, Altman not only let it ride, he turned the interview around and started asking Rogan questions about himself.

Another contrast with the tech gurus of yore: Altman says he doesn't care much about money. His surprise firing at OpenAI, he says, taught him to value his loving relationships — a "recompilation of values" that was "a blessing in disguise." In the spring, Altman told a Stanford entrepreneur class that his money-, power-, and status-seeking phases were all in the rearview. "At this point," Altman said, "I feel driven by wanting to do something useful and interesting."

Altman is even looking into universal basic income — giving money to everyone, straight out, no strings attached. That's partly because he thinks artificial intelligence will make paying jobs as rare as coelacanths. But it's also a product of unusual self-awareness. Altman, famously, was in the "first class" of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's ur-incubator of tech startups. Now that he's succeeded, he recalls that grant money as a kind of UBI — a gift that he says prevented him from ending up at Goldman Sachs. Rare is the colossus of industry who acknowledges that anyone other than himself tugged on those bootstraps.

Altman's seeming rejection of wealth is a key element of his mythos. On a recent appearance on the "All-In" podcast, the hosts questioned Altman's lack of equity in OpenAI, saying it made him seem less trustworthy — no skin in the game. Altman explained that the company was set up as a nonprofit, so equity wasn't a thing. He really wished he'd gotten some, he added, if only to stop the endless stream of questions about his lack of equity. Charming! (Under Altman's watch, OpenAI is shifting to a for-profit model.)

Altman didn't get where he is because he made a fortune in tech. Y Combinator, where he started out, was the launchpad for monsters like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and dozens of other companies you've never heard of, because they never got big. Loopt, the company Altman founded at 20 years old, was in the second category. Yet despite that, the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham named him president of the incubator in 2014. It wasn't because of what Altman had achieved — Loopt burned through $30 million before it folded — but because he embodies two key Silicon Valley mindsets. First, he emphasizes the need for founders to express absolute certainty in themselves, no matter what anyone says. And second, he believes that scale and growth can solve every problem. To Altman, those two tenets aren't just the way to launch a successful startup — they're the twin turbines that power all societal progress. More than any of his predecessors, he openly preaches Silicon Valley's almost religious belief in certainty and scale. They are the key to his mindset — and maybe to our AI-enmeshed future.

In 2020, Altman wrote a blog post called "The Strength of Being Misunderstood." It was primarily a paean to the idea of believing you are right about everything. Altman suggested that people spend too much time worrying about what other people think about them, and should instead "trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status." Being misunderstood by most people, he went on, is actually a strength, not a weakness — "as long as you are right."

For Altman, being right is not the same thing as being good. When he talks about who the best founders are and what makes a successful business, he doesn't seem to think it matters what their products actually do or how they affect the world. Back in 2015, Altman told Kara Swisher that Y Combinator didn't really care about the specific pitches it funded — the founders just needed to have "raw intelligence." Their actual ideas? Not so important.

"The ideas are so malleable," Altman said. "Are these founders determined, are they passionate about this, do they seem committed to it, have they really thought about all the issues they're likely to face, are they good communicators?" Altman wasn't betting on their ideas — he was betting on their ability to sell their ideas, even if they were bad. That's one of the reasons, he says, that Y Combinator didn't have a coworking space — so there was no place for people to tell each other that their ideas sucked.

"There are founders who don't take no for an answer and founders who bend the world to their will," Altman told a startups class at Stanford, "and those are the ones who are in the fund." What really matters, he added, is that founders "have the courage of your convictions to keep doing this unpopular thing because you understand the way the world is going in a way that other people don't."

One example Altman cites is Airbnb, whose founders hit on their big idea when they maxed out their credit cards trying to start a different company and wanted to rent out a spare room for extra cash. He also derives his disdain for self-doubt from Elon Musk, who once gave him a tour of SpaceX. "The thing that sticks in memory," Altman wrote in 2019, "was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking 'huh, so that's the benchmark for what conviction looks like.'"

This, Altman says, is why founding a startup is something people should do when they're young — because it requires turning work-life balance into a pile of radioactive slag. "Have almost too much self-belief," he writes. "Almost to the point of delusion."

So if Altman believes that certainty in an idea is more important than the idea itself, how does he measure success? What determines whether a founder turns out to be "right," as he puts it? The answer, for Altman, is scale. You start a company, and that company winds up with lots of users and makes a lot of money. A good idea is one that scales, and scaling is what makes an idea good.

For Altman, this isn't just a business model. It's a philosophy. "You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value," he wrote in a 2019 blog post called "How to Be Successful." It doesn't matter what — real estate, natural resources, equity in a business. And the way to make things increase rapidly in value is "by making things people want at scale." In Altman's view, big growth isn't just a way to keep investors happy. It's the evidence that confirms one's unwavering belief in the idea.

Artificial intelligence itself, of course, is based on scale — on the ever-expanding data that AI feeds on. Altman said at a conference that OpenAI's models would double or triple in size every year, which he took to mean they'll eventually reach full sentience. To him, that just goes to show the potency of scale as a concept — it has the ability to imbue a machine with true intelligence. "It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it," Altman said on "All-In." "I don't believe this literally, but it's like a spiritual point — that intelligence is an emergent property of matter, and that's like a rule of physics or something."

Altman says he doesn't actually know how intelligent, or superintelligent, AI will get — or what it will think when it starts thinking. But he believes that scale will provide the answers. "We will hit limits, but we don't know where those will be," he said on Ezra Klein's podcast. "We'll also discover new things that are really powerful. We don't know what those will be either." You just trust that the exponential growth curves will take you somewhere you want to go.

In all the recordings and writings I've sampled, Altman speaks only rarely about things he likes outside startups and AI. In the canon I find few books, no movies, little visual art, not much food or drink. Asked what his favorite fictional utopias are, Altman mentions "Star Trek" and the Isaac Asimov short story "The Last Question," which is about an artificial intelligence ascending to godhood over eons and creating a new universe. Back in 2015, he said "The Martian," the tale of a marooned astronaut hacking his way back to Earth, was eighth on his stack of bedside books. Altman has also praised the Culture series by Iain Banks, about a far-future galaxy of abundance and space communism, where humans and AIs live together in harmony.

Fiction, to Altman, appears to hold no especially mysterious human element of creativity. He once acknowledged that the latest version of ChatGPT wasn't very good at storytelling, but he thought it was going to get much better. "You show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story, which I don't think is magic," he said. "I think we really understand that well now. We just haven't tried to do that."

It's also not clear to me whether Altman listens to music — at least not for pleasure. On the "Life in Seven Songs" podcast, most of the favorite songs Altman cited were from his high school and college days. But his top pick was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. "This became something I started listening to when I worked," he said. "It's a great level of excitement, but it's not distracting. You can listen to it very loudly and very quietly." Music can be great, but it shouldn't get in the way of productivity.

For Altman, even drug use isn't recreational. In 2016, a "New Yorker" profile described Altman as nervous to the point of hypochondria. He would telephone his mother — a physician — to ask whether a headache might be cancer. He once wrote that he "used to hate criticism of any sort and actively avoided it," and he has said he used to be "a very anxious and unhappy person." He relied on caffeine to be productive, and used marijuana to sleep.

Now, though? He's "very calm." He doesn't sweat criticism anymore. If that sounds like the positive outcome of years of therapy, well — sort of. Last summer, Altman told Joe Rogan that an experience with "psychedelic therapy" had been one of the most important turning points in his life. "I struggled with all kinds of anxiety and other negative things," he said, "and to watch all of that go away — I came back a totally different person, and I was like, 'I have been lied to.'"

He went into more detail on the Songs podcast in September. "I think psychedelic experiences can be totally incredible, and the ones that have been totally life-changing for me have been the ones where you go travel to a guide, and it's psychedelic medicine," he said. As for his anxiety, "if you had told me a one-weekend-long retreat in Mexico was going to change that, I would have said, 'absolutely not.'" Psychedelics were just another life hack to resolve emotional turmoil. (I reached out to Altman and offered to discuss my observations with him, in the hopes he'd correct any places where he felt I was misreading him. He declined.)

AI started attracting mainstream attention only in the past couple of years, but the field is much older than that — and Altman cofounded OpenAI nearly a decade ago. So he's been asked what "artificial general intelligence" is and when we're going to get it so often, and for so long, that his answers often include a whiff of frustration. These days, he says that AGI is when the machine is as smart as the median human — choose your own value for "smart" and "median" there — and "superintelligence" is when it's smarter than all of us meatbags squished together. But ask him what AI is for, and he's a lot less certain-seeming today than he used to be.

There's the ability to write code, sure. Altman also says AI will someday be a tutor as good as those available to rich people. It'll do consultations on medical issues, maybe help with "productivity" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which a person can learn something, versus having to look it up). And he said scientists had been emailing him to say that the latest versio of ChatGPT has increased the rate at which they can do "great science" (by which he seems to mean the speed at which they can run evaluations of possible new drugs).

And what would you or I do with a superintelligent buddy? "What if everybody in the world had a really competent company of 10,000 employees?" Altman once asked. "What would we be able to create for each other?" He was being rhetorical — but whatever the answer turns out to be, he's sure it will be worth the tremendous cost in energy and resources it will take to achieve it. As OpenAI-type services expand and proliferate, he says, "the marginal cost of intelligence and the marginal cost of energy are going to trend rapidly toward zero." He has recently speculated that intelligence will be more valuable than money, and that instead of universal basic income, we should give people universal basic compute — which is to say, free access to AI. In Altman's estimation, not knowing what AI will do doesn't mean we shouldn't go ahead and restructure all of society to serve its needs.

And besides, AI won't take long to give us the answer. Superintelligence, Altman has promised, is only "thousands of days" away — half a decade, at minimum. But, he says, the intelligent machine that emerges probably won't be an LLM chatbot. It will use an entirely different technical architecture that no one, not even OpenAI, has invented yet.

That, at its core, reflects an unreconstructed, dot-com-boom mindset. Altman doesn't know what the future will bring, but he's in a hurry to get there. No matter what you think about AI — productivity multiplier, economic engine, hallucinating plagiarism machine, Skynet — it's not hard to imagine what could happen, for good and ill, if you combine Altman's absolute certainty with monstrous, unregulated scale. It only took a couple of decades for Silicon Valley to go from bulky computer mainframes to the internet, smartphones, and same-day delivery — along with all the disinformation, political polarization, and generalized anxiety that came with them.

But that's the kind of ballistic arc of progress that Altman is selling. He is, at heart, an evangelist for the Silicon Valley way. He didn't build the tech behind ChatGPT; the most important thing he ever built and scaled is Y Combinator, an old-fashioned business network of human beings. His wealth comes from investments in other people's companies. He's a macher, not a maker.

In a sense, Altman has codified the beliefs and intentions of the tech big shots who preceded him. He's just more transparent about it than they were. Did Steve Jobs project utter certainty? Sure. But he didn't give interviews about the importance of projecting utter certainty; he just introduced killer laptops, blocked rivals from using his operating system, and built the app store. Jeff Bezos didn't found Amazon by telling the public he planned to scale his company to the point that it would pocket 40 cents of every dollar spent online; he just started mailing people books. But Altman is on the record. When he says he's absolutely sure ChatGPT will change the world, we know that he thinks CEOs have to say they're absolutely sure their product will change the world. His predecessors in Silicon Valley wrote the playbook for Big Tech. Altman is just reading it aloud. He's touting a future he hasn't built yet, along with the promise that he can will it into existence — whatever it'll wind up looking like — one podcast appearance at a time.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.

The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.

Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container's worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.

Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father's backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company's pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.

But the Seiders brothers didn't create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company's legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.

One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn't receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. "It wasn't like him," Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan's new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.

Roy put down the phone and felt sick to his stomach. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but the future of his new company was now in jeopardy. "We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he recalls.

As the brothers grappled with the fallout from the tragedy, things grew even more dire. Ivan had died without a will, and it wasn't clear who was in charge at the factory, putting the entire production line in jeopardy. Six months after Yeti's launch, it looked as though the cooler would vanish from store shelves just as suddenly as it had arrived.

Today, Yeti is worth $3.5 billion. This is the untold chapter of one of the great success stories in American business, and how it was very nearly stopped in its tracks.

Cold things don't stay cold for long in the Texas Hill Country. Summer here begins in April, when porch thermometers hit the 90s. For the next six months, you could fry a tortilla on your dashboard and dip it in the hot queso in your cup holder. If you're out working in that heat, all you can think about is your next ice-cold drink.

At the Seiders' home in Driftwood, 20 miles southwest of Austin, Roger — the family's 79-year-old patriarch — keeps a refrigerator out back stocked with cold drinks for the UPS drivers when they stop by with a delivery. "They can have anything they want, except for beer," Roger tells me one afternoon as we rock in a swinging chair, watching a parched driver make his way to the fridge. That's Texas hospitality for you. It's something Roger always tried to instill in his four kids, including Ryan and Roy.

The brothers were Texans before the state of Texas existed. Eight generations later, their name still means something to old-timers. "When they decide to build something, it's top shelf, the best you can get," says Jay McBride, who runs the fishing department at McBride's Guns, an Austin institution since 1960.

Back in 1977, when Roger was working as a high school shop instructor, his search for a flexible epoxy finish that wouldn't crack on his fishing rods led him to start his own business. Today, Flex Coat sells up to $1 million of product each year. "I never dreamed it would be so big," he says.

Just like their old man, Ryan and Roy loved to brainstorm ways to improve the products they depended upon. After Ryan graduated from Texas A&M in 1996 with a degree in wildlife management, he started a specialty fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in Roger's backyard shop. The 10-foot Launcher could fling a line over 100 yards, while the Scrape Rod was tough enough for fishing in thick grass. Fishing celebrities like Flip Pallot, host of "The Walker's Cay Chronicles" on ESPN, would phone Ryan up for gear advice and invite him out turkey hunting.

After Roy completed his degree in management information systems at Texas Tech, he, too, returned to the Austin area determined to follow in his father's footsteps. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own like my dad," he tells me. "I knew I wanted to start my own business." He loved being out on his boat, and he became preoccupied with designing a cooler that could double as a casting platform — one durable enough to withstand his adrenaline-charged style of fishing.

The best coolers on the market came from Australia, where packing up the Land Rover and "going bush" was a national pastime. While American coolers were typically manufactured by injecting melted plastic into a static mold, high-end Australian coolers — "eskies" in Aussi slang — deployed a technique called rotational molding, which produced stronger coolers with more complex designs and fewer material flaws.

The closest approximation to an eskie you could find in American stores was the Icey-Tek. Roy tracked down the man who was importing them from Thailand and suggested they team up. But he wound up being more impressed with the cooler than with his new business partner. So he decided to partner with Ryan and strike his own import deal with the producers of Icey-Tek. Ryan invested $130,000, and the brothers shared an email address and a single desk. To brand their cooler, they looked for a name that would evoke a harsh terrain — and that would look good on a hat or a T-shirt.

Yeti, they would call it — as in the Himalayan ice monster. "We may not have found the Yeti," they wrote on their website, "but we make a really great ice-chest."

And it was a great ice chest. But it was a far cry from perfect. The original Yeti, which the brothers called the Roughneck, was boxy and utilitarian. The sharp corners were no fun to bang a knee on. Some of the coolers had a puzzling red stain on the bottom.

That's when Ivan Brown entered the picture.

In 2006, the Seiders brothers traveled to Thailand to see the production of their coolers up close. The disappointing results suddenly made sense. Production was sloppy and haphazard. Workers at the factory were plopping fresh coolers onto the red dirt floor, which explained the stains.

As the brothers tried to figure out how to fix the problem, the name they kept coming back to was Ivan, an Aussie designer whose work was a cut above everyone else they knew. From his factory in the Philippines, he could manufacture a cooler or a kayak or a truck camper shell at a fraction of what it would cost in America. So Roy and Ryan set up a meeting and hopped on a flight from Bangkok to Manilla. Within hours they were in a car with Ivan, driving south toward his factory in Angeles City.

After the factory tour in Thailand, Ivan's production line was a welcome sight. Cement floors meant no more red stains. Like the Roughneck, Ivan's Downunder coolers were constructed from a single piece of plastic, for strength. But they also had rounded-off corners and other thoughtful features, such as rubber feet to prevent them from sliding on a boat deck and a removable basket to keep food from getting wet.

What's more, Roy and Ryan recognized a kindred spirit. Ivan was the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors, and he wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids. And, like Yeti, his was a family business.

Ivan had been in his 50s when he decamped for the Philippines, seeking a new start. Back in Australia, he had launched a business manufacturing auto accessories, including fiberglass tops for trucks. "He was a risk-taker," recalls his first wife, Suzanne Handley. His self-confidence only grew when he obtained a patent for a flip-up sunroof he had created, which would go on to receive a prestigious Australian design award.

The problem was, Ivan had a habit of living beyond his means. He had a thing for flashy watches and nice restaurants. "The more you earn, the more you need," he liked to tell his eldest daughter, Clare. He ran up so many debts that tax collectors and creditors spent years pursuing him in Queensland courts. "He was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," says Malcolm, Ivan's younger brother.

Like Roy and Ryan, Ivan and Malcolm were tight. Malcolm, who made a small fortune in trucking, supported Ivan through the lean times. The two brothers bought homes facing each other at a marina on the outskirts of Brisbane. "I could look into his kitchen," Malcolm says.

Amid his financial troubles, Ivan's marriage to Suzanne disintegrated, and the separation left a wedge between him and his daughters. The Philippines, which had a thriving Australian expat community and generous tax benefits for foreign entrepreneurs, offered a chance to start over.

But it was also a dangerous place to do business. The murder rate was four times greater than in Australia, and it was said that a killer could be hired for as little as $500. Filipino police and prosecutors tended to favor the well-connected, and many expats opted to live in gated communities under 24-hour security.

Ivan convinced Malcolm to join him. Divorced and bored with life in Queensland, Malcolm jumped at the chance for an adventure — and, perhaps, to make another fortune. In 1999, the brothers signed the papers establishing Outback Five Star. The company's articles of incorporation listed Ivan as president and Malcolm as vice president. Each received an equal share in the venture, splitting 99.2% of the stock.

Malcolm signed the lease on Outback's factory, a long metal building with a peaked roof. It was located at the Clark Freeport, a former US military base in Angeles City that had been transformed into a tax-free zone.

But the company struggled to survive. From 2004 to 2006, according to financial records, it lost nearly $150,000. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two," Malcolm recalls. "It got so tight that we were making cello cases to survive." Since Ivan was essentially bankrupt, Malcolm had to tap his personal funds to cover payroll and buy equipment.

By the time the two brothers from Texas showed up on Outback's factory floor, the two brothers from Australia were barely scraping by.

On that initial visit, the straight-laced Seiders brothers weren't exactly taken with Angeles City. As much as Roy enjoyed Ivan's company, he was grateful Ryan was with him. "I was not about to go to the Philippines by myself," he recalls. Angeles City was the Wild East, the vice capital of the Philippines, a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.

Malcolm could see how uncomfortable Roy and Ryan were one humid evening when Ivan took them out to the Tom Cat, a seedy nightclub Malcolm owned on a neon-lit street known as "Blow Row." Like many expat hangouts, the Tom Cat swarmed with bikini-clad girls and white-haired men. Foreigners looking for sex would pay $20 to escort girls to a more intimate setting, where further transactions might ensue.

Malcolm isn't shy about admitting that profits from the sex trade helped keep Outback afloat. He insists that the girls at his bars were of age and there of their own free will, but stories of sex trafficking are common in the Philippines. "Everybody portrays it as a sleazy business," Malcolm says. "But I looked at it as the matchmaking business."

According to Malcolm and other family members, it was under such circumstances that Ivan met his future wife, Gloria. In October 1998, Malcolm was celebrating his 48th birthday at the Firehouse, a bar in Manila's red-light district. Gloria, then a single mother, was there that night. Ivan bought Gloria a drink and, by Malcolm's telling, took her to Swagman's, an Australian-themed hotel nearby, where they spent the night.

To those who witnessed their courtship, there was no doubt that Ivan was enamored of Gloria. "She was the only girl I ever saw him with," says Bryan Hammer, an American businessman who assisted Ivan and Malcolm in establishing Outback. But Hammer wondered if the feeling was mutual. "She was mean to him, even in public."

As Ivan and Gloria's relationship developed, she became increasingly entwined in his business. Under Philippine law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino. By the time Roy and Ryan Seiders showed up, Gloria had taken on that role at Outback, giving her the power to review and sign off on the company's financial records. Her influence expanded further when Ivan decided to buy a home. Since foreigners couldn't buy property, it would need to be in Gloria's name. So Ivan asked Malcolm to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria, effectively padding her assets so she could qualify for a mortgage.

The details of what happened next are murky. Over the next six months, a confusing game of musical chairs ensued. In addition to Gloria's recently acquired shares, three members of her family — her daughter, her future son-in-law, and her half-sister — were awarded positions as dummy shareholders in the company. In the process, Gloria went from owning less than 1% of Outback's stock to controlling a majority of the company.

In 2008, in the midst of all the stock reshuffling, Ivan and Gloria surprised their friends when an ordinary party was revealed to be their nuptials. After nine years together, they were at last husband and wife.

But a few weeks after the wedding, Outback's fortunes took another turn. Ivan evidently hadn't known about the stock transfers until his accountant brought them to his attention — and he wasn't happy about it. On May 2, 2008, he wrote the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission: "This is to inform you that GLORIA F. BROWN has resigned as Corporate Secretary." Malcolm reclaimed his shares in the company and his title as vice president. The remaining dummy shares were transferred to three members of Malcolm's extended family. Gloria was left with nothing in her own name, apart from her joint assets through marriage.

In late 2007, a few months before Ivan and Gloria's wedding, the Seiders brothers had returned to Angeles City, where they spent 10 days at Outback's headquarters. As monsoon rains pounded on the factory roof, Ivan and Roy hustled back and forth between the office and the production floor where the workers would fabricate prototypes out of Bondo putty and fiberglass. "These guys are artists," Roy says. "It was a ton of fun."

Ivan showed them how he had improved the design of his Downunder cooler. He had bulked up the foam insulation, given it a leak-proof drain plug, integrated the hinge to make it more robust, and added a freezer-style gasket for a better seal. Roy and Ryan incorporated those same ideas into the Tundra. They also borrowed the contours from Ivan's line of fiberglass coolers and extended the hinge to stretch the full length of the back of the cooler. "For whatever reason, I just liked that look," Roy says.

Some of the old Icey-Tek features, including the rope handles and tie-down slots on the base of the cooler, also made it into the new design. "That was a big deal," Roy says. "Being able to strap your cooler down and still open and close the lid." All the tinkering reminded him of the projects he had worked on in his father's workshop, but on a much larger scale. "After four years being in the cooler business, I had all these ideas built up in my head about what makes a perfect cooler," Roy recalls. "I saw this opportunity to build a cooler from the ground up."

The collaboration also worked out well for Ivan. By the time the Tundras started popping out of their molds in April 2008, he was on the path to financial success. Outback, which employed some 150 workers, soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets. "He was turning a corner and starting to make money," Malcolm says.

On the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Ivan left work and climbed into his forest green Toyota Land Cruiser. The sky was hazy and rain droplets flecked against the windshield as Ivan crossed the two-lane Friendship Bridge and neared his turn-off to his home. Suddenly, a Honda motorbike zipped up along his left side, as if to pass. There were two men on the bike, their faces hidden by helmets.

The rider in back raised a 45-caliber handgun and fired at least four shots through the window of Ivan's Land Cruiser. The car veered off the road and rear-ended another motorcycle, sending its driver tumbling onto the ground, before slamming into the wall of the Serra Monte Lodge, an establishment that rents rooms by the hour. Ivan slumped in his seat. Blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the fabric of his plaid shirt.

Malcolm, who lived in the same gated community as Ivan and Gloria, was at home when a friend called to say that a green Land Cruiser had been in an accident on the main road. Malcolm rushed over to his brother's house, but no one answered the door. He was getting ready to drive to the scene of the accident when Gloria appeared. Ivan had already been taken to the mortuary, she told him. Together, they drove off to see Ivan's body.

The next morning, Malcolm got to the factory at around seven. As vice president, he felt he had to assume the reins at Outback. He told the employees to go home until Ivan's affairs were sorted, and left.

But within the hour, Gloria arrived and announced that she was in charge. She countermanded Malcolm's decision: The factory, she said, would stay open. "I asked Gloria what gave her the right to say this," Malcolm said in a statement prepared for legal filings. Gloria responded that she was now the president and major shareholder.

That afternoon, after meeting with his lawyer, Malcolm returned to the factory with his son and placed a padlock on the factory's gate. But the next time they came back, the lock had been cut. An armed guard pointed a gun at Malcolm and his son and ordered them to leave.

As Gloria and Malcolm battled for control of the company, production ground to a halt. Outback's accounts were frozen, and employees could not be paid.

Gloria appealed to the bank to grant her full access to the company's funds. "My husband, Ivan Brown, had long speculated on his fate (he was brutally murdered by still unknown assailants)," she wrote. "He indeed made sure that the corporation's papers are in order and that I can easily take charge of its operations. Unfortunately, greed and opportunity prevailed over the mind of Mr. Malcolm Brown and his cohorts." (Gloria and Outback did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eight thousand miles away in Texas, the Seiders brothers had begun a frantic search for alternative suppliers, hopping on planes and visiting other factories. Their business had just gotten off the ground, and suddenly its entire future was at risk. But given their relationship with Ivan, they were still hoping they could stick with Outback.

"If the factory cannot supply soon, Yeti will lose US market share and it will be almost impossible to recover," they emailed Malcolm. "If this fight continues it will inevitably get tied up in Philippine courts for many more weeks if not months and therefore everybody loses. Could you help us by temporarily allowing the factory to resume production while resolving ownership?"

Malcolm was incensed. "Ivan was murdered for greed," he replied. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do… You guys are more than welcome to find alternative suppliers for your market if you wish to do so."

"We too have a strong feeling for finding justice for Ivan," the brothers wrote back. "But also, continuing the successful manufacturing business that he has started."

From the start, police considered Ivan's killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But without a murder weapon or any forensic evidence, they had little to go on. The most promising lead came after Malcolm offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

A cigarette vendor came forward, claiming to have seen the trigger man before he put his helmet on. According to police, when the vendor was shown a book of criminals known as the "Rogue's Gallery," he picked out a Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas, suspected to be a member of a "gun-for-hire" gang. That October, the Northern Philippine Times reported that police had filed murder charges against Salas — and Gloria.

"We have circumstantial evidence against somebody whom we suspect to be the mastermind," announced Pierre Bucsit, the local police chief. "The capture of the suspected gunman will complete our investigation toward arresting the author of the crime."

But the case quickly fell apart. When a police investigator named Romeo Amarillo had first showed up at the factory, he found Gloria to be defensive and uncooperative. But any link to her was purely circumstantial. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charges against Gloria due to insufficient evidence. Until the police found Salas, whose connection to the crime was limited to the single eyewitness, they had nothing else to go on. That hope vanished in October 2014, when Salas was killed in a police shootout.

Whoever murdered Ivan, it's clear who benefited the most from his death. Ivan didn't have a will, which under Philippine law meant his estate would likely be shared by Gloria and his two daughters from his first marriage. In a court filing, Gloria wrote that Ivan's shares were being "settled among his heirs." But Ivan's daughter Clare told me that neither she nor her sister received anything from their father's estate. "I got nothing," she says.

Gloria also moved quickly to take control of Ivan's company. A week after he was killed, she submitted a document to the securities commission claiming that an unscheduled meeting of Outback's officers and shareholders had taken place in mid-August, a little over a month before Ivan's murder. Malcolm, who was still listed as a board member, was not notified of the meeting. According to the document, Ivan had given himself control of 80.8% of Outback's stock, and Gloria now owned 18%. That left Malcolm with just 2,000 shares — a fraction of a percent of the company. The new board, composed largely of Gloria's relatives, unanimously named her as president, and her daughter as vice president.

Malcolm filed a complaint against Gloria with the prosecutor's office, claiming she had forged the document. Nathaniel Colobong, Ivan's longtime accountant, is listed in the papers as the company's external auditor. But he tells me that he was unaware of Ivan making any of the stock transfers Gloria claims he made. In fact, he told investigators that Gloria had "started to get angry with her husband" after she had been stripped of her shares earlier that year. But Colobong was unwilling to testify. "I was also afraid for my life," he says.

Regulators accepted Gloria's version of events, and the lead prosecutor in the forgery case ultimately declined to bring the charges against her. The relevant documents, he tells me, were destroyed during a typhoon. According to Outback's subsequent filings, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.

For the first year after Ivan's death, Malcolm remained in the Philippines, protected around the clock by armed guards. Eventually he gave up the fight and returned to Australia. His biggest mistake, he tells me, was putting his faith in the Philippine justice system. "You and I come from countries where you get justice," he says. "If I had to do it over again, I would have had her shot. I'd do the same thing to her that she did to my brother."

After Ivan's murder, some of Outback's clients sided with Malcolm and refused to do business with the company. "We decided not to place any further orders due to the rumors and uncertainty of dealing with Gloria," recalls Terry Tate, a former buyer for Ray's Outdoors, who had visited both Ivan and Gloria in the Philippines.

But the Seiders brothers continued to contract with Outback. Whatever they felt about Ivan's murder, they were focused on doing what it took to keep their company alive. To get the Outback's employees back to work, the brothers even prepaid Gloria for their orders. Soon, brand new Yeti Tundras were once again being unloaded in Texas. "Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy tells me.

Other business decisions they made may have been born of crisis, but proved equally shrewd. To make the most of their dwindling inventory, Roy and Ryan bumped up the price on their coolers. Remarkably, none of their buyers balked. Roy came up with a pricing strategy he called "10x" — as in, charging 10 times what their competitors were asking. Like Balenciaga sneakers and Sub-Zero fridges, the eye-popping prices of Yeti's products wound up making them more — not less — desirable.

The brothers also found a US-based supplier to ensure that their supply chain could never be held hostage again. "As tragic as Ivan's death was, all of a sudden we are a much stronger company," Roy explained on a hunting podcast.

The success of the Tundra, along with Yeti's viral marketing, helped turn the company into a kind of redneck Patagonia. Yeti Coolers went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan earned hundreds of millions of dollars after selling most of their shares.

Yeti's success has been good for Outback. The year that Ivan was murdered, according to the company's financial statement, it had $1.9 million in sales. Ten years later, thanks in large part to Yeti, its sales were $9 million.

At Yeti's headquarters, a conference room is named for Ivan Brown, to honor his contribution to the company. Every few years, Gloria or her representatives from Outback travel to Texas to meet with Yeti's management. But, in the past, when Gloria has invited the Seiderses to return to the Philippines for a visit, they've politely declined. "They make their employees go," their father Roger tells me. "But they don't go."

Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.