I would not trust someone who claims they are working on a project that benefits people.

I would be less suspicious of someone working on a selfish project that might benefit people as a side effect.

Sam Altman's work on OpenAI is hard to characterize as selfish when he owns none of it and doesn't get paid for it.

He is the CEO, and according to levels.fyi, they give out stock grants.

Why on earth would the CEO not get a stock grant when the entry level SWEs do?

He's said that he doesn't take any stock. I don't know why so many people thing this is strange. He's already immensely rich. While this role might not make him richer, but it does give him huge amounts of power and influence.

Richness comes in many flavours other than $$$s. As you point out huge amounts of power and influence - something money cant buy.

Well, tbf it kinda can but I get your point

Because he chose to not be compensated because he felt it was too big of a conflict of interest given the stakes

Sure. Just don't look at the boats.

It was Sam Altman being behind WorldCoin that made me very suspicious of OpenAI when I learned he was involved with that, too.