🌊 Exclusive Interview on the OpenAI Whistleblower

One of the nation’s top whistleblower attorneys shares her thoughts on Suchir Balaji

By Max Frost

It was one of the more shocking clips, even for Tucker Carlson’s show.

The conversation revolved around Suchir Balaji, a 26-year-old AI whiz who was found dead in his apartment last November. That fall, he had resigned from OpenAI, revealed to The New York Times how the tech company was stealing copyrighted content, and was named as a key witness in that outlet’s major lawsuit against OpenAI. A month later, he was found dead in his apartment from a gunshot wound. Police ruled it a suicide.

Balaji’s mom didn’t believe that – and neither did Tucker Carlson.

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman came on Tucker’s show, Tucker didn’t hold back.

“So, you’ve had complaints from one programmer who said you guys were basically stealing people’s stuff and not paying them, and then he wound up murdered,” Carlson said. “What was that?”

“A great tragedy,” Altman said. “He committed suicide.”

Tucker: “Do you think he committed suicide?”

Altman: “I really do. This was like a friend of mine. This is like a guy that, and not a close friend, but this is someone that worked at OpenAI for a very long time. I mean, I was really shaken by this tragedy…it looks like a suicide to me.”

Tucker: “Why does it look like a suicide?”

Altman: “It was a gun he had purchased. It was the – this is gruesome to talk about, but I read the whole medical record. Does it not look like one to you?”

Tucker: “No, he was definitely murdered, I think. There were signs of a struggle, of course. The surveillance camera, the wires had been cut. He had just ordered take out food, come back from a vacation with his friends on Catalina Island. No indication at all that he was suicidal. No note and no behavior. He had just spoken to a family member on the phone. And then he’s found dead with blood in multiple rooms. So that’s impossible. It seems really obvious he was murdered.”

Tucker: “His mother claims he was murdered on your orders.”

Altman: “Do you believe that?”

Tucker: “I’m just asking…”

Altman: “I haven’t done too many interviews where I’ve been accused of, like…”

Tucker: “Oh, I’m not accusing you at all. I’m just saying his mother says that. I don’t think a fair read of the evidence suggests suicide at all.”

In today’s deep-dive, we look at the facts of the case and sit down with Mary Inman – one of the nation’s leading attorneys representing whistleblowers against companies including Meta and Theranos – to get her thoughts.

Despite the authorities’ conclusion, Balaji’s family immediately rejected the suicide finding. They ordered a private autopsy, which found an “atypical” bullet trajectory for a suicide and an injury on the back of his head, suggesting a struggle. Private investigators also claimed that a surveillance camera in his apartment building was disabled, that no suicide note was found, and that evidence like blood spatter in multiple rooms was overlooked by investigators.

“I was the last person to talk to him. He was happy, more – not depressed or anything. And it was his birthday week,” his father said in December.

“He made plans to see us in January. That was the last phone conversation he had with anyone. He went into his apartment and never came out. How can anyone believe that there was no suicide note left?” said his mother, Poornima Ramarao.

Ramarao reached out to Tucker Carlson, asking him to investigate the case. He had her on his podcast, where she said it made no sense that someone “so courageous” – courageous enough to be a whistleblower – would do such a “cowardly act. It doesn’t add up at all.”

“What doesn’t add up is there’s blood all over the apartment and there’s a piece of a wig on the ground covered in blood that’s not his wig.”

Mary Inman told Roca that “[Balaji’s] case is not, to me, the typical case. He did seem to resign. I don’t know enough what pressures he was under, [but] it doesn’t necessarily follow the

standard playbook that I’ve seen.”

That playbook goes like this: Somebody sees wrongdoing in their corporation and they tell a higher-up, expecting to be celebrated for catching it. Instead, the institution turns on them, kicking them out of meetings, punishing them for insignificant things, and working to discredit them. She highlighted one major healthcare company, which responded to two separate whistleblower complaints by ordering psychiatric evaluations.

“So instead of the whistleblower shining the light and saying, ‘Look over here at the wrongdoing,’ it ricochets back at them. ‘You are the problem!’ I mean, it’s as old as the medieval concept of shoot the messenger to divert attention from the message. So that can be enormously disorienting,” Inman says.

Sometimes the retaliation can be petty: She cited one instance from the first Trump Administration, when someone claimed that Trump was trying to improperly get his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a security clearance.

“The woman who refused Kushner’s clearance…she was retaliated against because she’s a woman with dwarfism, so people started to put all of her files out of reach,” Inman says.

Or it can be severe, with people losing jobs and then being unable to find new ones because executives blacklist those who blow the whistle.

Inman says, “People are going to say, ‘You don’t want to employ [them], they are known to raise concerns. They’re not team players. Then you end up largely being blacklisted, and unfortunately, too many of my clients who may have PhDs or have gone to the top of their careers in finance become dog walkers.”

Inman cites instances of families turning on whistleblowers, with people asking their spouses why they did what they did. Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?

The sum of this blowback is an intense pressure that can result in suicide. She cites the recent case of John Barnett, the Boeing engineer who was found dead by suicide in March 2024 while testifying against the company.

People immediately jumped to foul play; however, Inman says, “In his family’s wrongful termination lawsuit against Boeing, we actually see his tragic suicide note, which basically

says, in many different scrolls – a lot of writing and one of the margins – that whistleblowers need more protection.”

So does Inman believe that Balaji died by suicide?

“I don’t know enough of the basic facts to really make a statement here. And I just – I so feel for Suchir’s family that I just don’t know.”

But as she pointed out, it doesn’t take physical violence for a company to ruin someone’s life.