Sam might be completely wrong about the most important things (I don't think so, but I don't think it's super unlikely either) and I still peg him as mostly genuine and smart, while not being very concerned with and certainly not being very good at being likeable.

He was fairly outspoken about getting (even more) rich off of other investments and believing OpenAI was simply too important to make it a conflict of interest, and mostly considers it a nuisance/distraction. That's fairly arrogant, and, again, might be completely off but I still do believe he means that and I would give it good odds to be the entirely right course of action, if most impact/most quickly is what you are going for.