Samuel Harris Altman

OpenAI's board fired Altman on November 17, 2023, saying he had been "not consistently candid." Within days, about 97 percent of the roughly 770 people who worked there had signed a letter threatening to quit and follow him to Microsoft unless the board reinstated him, and it did. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research and product company behind ChatGPT and the GPT family of models. OpenAI builds large-scale AI models and turns them into consumer and enterprise tools. Altman co-founded the organization in 2015 and has served as its chief executive since 2019, a period in which OpenAI moved from a small nonprofit research lab into one of the most closely watched companies in technology.

Background

Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, and was raised primarily in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist, and his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker. He is the oldest of four siblings, with brothers Jack and Max and a sister, Annie. By family accounts in a New York Magazine profile, the household ate dinner together nightly and bonded over games.

He was given his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, at age eight, and began coding young. He attended John Burroughs School in Ladue, Missouri, then enrolled at Stanford to study computer science in 2003, dropping out after two years without a degree.

Altman is gay and married Oliver Mulherin in January 2024; the couple had a son in 2025 via surrogacy. He has been a vegetarian since childhood. In January 2025, his sister Ann filed a lawsuit alleging past sexual abuse, an allegation the family denied jointly; the matter remains contested and unresolved.

Getting started

Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-sharing smartphone application, in 2005 at age 19, as part of Y Combinator's inaugural funding batch. Loopt raised more than $30 million in venture funding but never achieved mass consumer traction; Green Dot Corporation acquired it in March 2012 for $43.4 million. In 2012 he co-founded the early-stage venture fund Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack, starting with roughly $21 million and building a portfolio of more than 400 stakes that came to include Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart, Helion Energy, and Worldcoin.

Altman joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011, and in February 2014 Paul Graham chose him, at 28, to become the accelerator's president. He ran YC until March 2019, pushing to fund roughly 1,000 companies a year and moving it into hard-technology categories beyond software, then left the presidency to work full time on OpenAI.

What he built

Altman co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab, alongside Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, and others. The founders announced $1 billion in funding pledges, of which roughly $130 million had been collected by 2019. Altman personally recruited Brockman, then Stripe's chief technology officer, and Sutskever, and helped bring in Musk's early backing.¹

He became OpenAI's CEO in March 2019 and restructured it around a capped-profit subsidiary designed to attract large-scale capital, most notably a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year partnership with Microsoft. ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, and passed one million signups within five days, then the fastest-growing consumer application on record.¹

Between November 17 and 21, 2023, OpenAI's board fired Altman, citing that he was "not consistently candid." Roughly 97 percent of about 770 employees signed a letter threatening to quit and join him at Microsoft, where he was briefly hired to lead a new AI team, unless he was reinstated. He returned as CEO within days, with a reconstituted board chaired by Bret Taylor. OpenAI's reported valuation rose from around $29 billion in 2023 to $157 billion in an October 2024 round, and above $300 billion through 2025 as SoftBank and others invested toward a broader compute and infrastructure buildout with Microsoft, Oracle, and Nvidia.

Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, operated through Tools for Humanity, in 2019, an eye-scanning biometric-identity and cryptocurrency project that has faced regulatory suspensions or bans in France, the United Kingdom, Bavaria, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, and Hong Kong over privacy concerns. Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, alleging a breach of the nonprofit's founding mission; a jury ruled against Musk's claims in a 2026 verdict reported as unanimous.

How he operates

Altman set out his operating philosophy in the widely circulated essay "How to Be Successful," which emphasizes compounding growth, self-belief, having a plan even if it is a bad one, aggressive prioritization, and equity ownership in something valuable that grows.² He believes the biggest risk is not taking enough risk.² He has treated both YC and OpenAI as platform bets rather than single products, recognizing an infrastructural wave early and building the layer beneath it, placing him in the Internet Wave Rider archetype. Reflecting on his changed role, Altman has said leading OpenAI was "fun until the release of ChatGPT; then the decisions became much more difficult."¹ He has advocated universal basic income and, in 2024, a proposed "universal basic compute."³

Where things stand

Altman remains OpenAI's CEO as of 2026, having survived the November 2023 board crisis, the Musk lawsuit, and continuing regulatory and safety scrutiny of both OpenAI and Worldcoin. Bloomberg estimated his net worth in 2024 at around $2 billion, drawn mostly from his venture portfolio; he has stated he holds no direct equity stake in OpenAI, a claim repeated frequently and disputed in some reporting. In December 2024 he donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund, and in July 2025 he described himself as "politically homeless," criticizing the Democratic Party on innovation policy, a shift from earlier Democratic-aligned giving.

Key facts

• Dropped out of Stanford after two years; his first company, Loopt, sold to Green Dot for $43.4 million in 2012.
• Became Y Combinator president at 28 in 2014, succeeding Paul Graham, and ran it until 2019.
• Fired as OpenAI CEO on November 17, 2023, and reinstated within days after about 97 percent of employees threatened to quit.
• ChatGPT reached one million users within five days of its November 2022 launch.
• OpenAI's reported valuation rose from about $29 billion in 2023 to $157 billion in late 2024 and to figures above $300 billion through 2025 and 2026.
• Also co-founded Worldcoin, a biometric-identity project suspended by regulators in multiple countries.