Because in this scenario, taxpayer money has been tied into the "winners" already. So that company eager to take his place? Well, that's bad news because the taxpayer fund already picked his company to be the right answer. So we want to prop up Altman and discourage that upstart that might disrupt this theoretical fund.

Same reason why OpenAI was pushing for regulation that they get to shape. Easy for OpenAI to navigate, hard for newcomers to get going.

Doesn't really create symmetry for risk/reward, because, for example, the corporate leadership decides how much to pay out to investors versus how much they spend including a lot of their own compensation.

So they can carve out the reward as they see fit, but if things go bad they can lean on the public investment as leverage to get bailouts.