Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been the chief executive officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI since 2019.

Altman attended Stanford University for two years before he dropped out and co-founded Loopt, a geosocial networking application for smartphones. Loopt was acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in March 2012. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm, and was the company's president from 2014 to 2019. He is a billionaire, due to investments in over 400 companies including Reddit, Worldcoin, Helion Energy and Instacart.

Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its CEO in 2019, a role that made him a prominent figure of the AI boom. He supervised the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. In 2023, he was ousted by the organization's board of directors for not being "consistently candid". The move was met with significant backlash from employees and investors, resulting in Altman's reinstatement five days later and the formation of a new board.

Altman was born in Chicago on April 22, 1985, to a Jewish American family. His mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist, and his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker. He is the eldest of four siblings: he has two brothers, Max and Jack; and a sister, Ann. His paternal great-grandfather was born in Płock, Poland. In 1989, the Altman family moved to Jerry's hometown of Clayton, Missouri.

At eight, Altman received his first computer—an Apple Macintosh—and began learning how to code and disassemble and examine computer hardware. He attended John Burroughs School, a private institution in Ladue, Missouri. In 2005, after studying computer science for two years at Stanford University in Stanford, California, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree.

In 2005, at the age of 19, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application. As CEO, he raised more than $30 million in venture capital for the company, including an initial investment of $5 million from Patrick Chung of Xfund and his team at New Enterprise Associates, followed by investments from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator. The company bought geolocation data from cellular providers and attempted to make an early social network for users to see where their friends were in real time. The board of Loopt attempted, twice, to remove Altman from his role as CEO, but Altman's supporters defended him and stated the attempts were not serious. In March 2012, after Loopt failed to gain significant user traction, the company was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.

In 2011, Altman became a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC), initially working on a part-time basis. In February 2014, he became president of YC, replacing YC co-founder Paul Graham, who had been his mentor. Altman aimed to expand YC to fund 1,000 new companies per year and sought to broaden the types of companies funded, particularly focusing on "hard technology" startups. In October 2015, Altman was involved in expanding YC's scope. He invested in multiple startups such as Stripe, Inc.. In September 2016, Altman's role at YC expanded to president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator and other units. By 2018, Altman's role at OpenAI made him less often present at YC, and several YC partners had complained to Graham that Altman was using his role to have the priority in investment opportunities. Graham said that Altman had agreed to leave YC, but was resisting in practice.

YC moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 2019. In March, Altman and YC began to falsely claim that Altman had transitioned from president to a less hands-on role as chairman of the board, allowing him to focus on OpenAI. Graham was "unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners' mistrust."

As of June 2024, Altman's investment portfolio includes stakes in over 400 companies, valued at around $2.8 billion. Some of these investments intersect with companies doing business with OpenAI, which has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. OpenAI's chairman of the board, Bret Taylor, maintained that Altman has been transparent about his investments.

In April 2012, Altman co-founded Hydrazine Capital with his brother, Jack Altman. The initial $21 million fund included a large part of the $5 million he got from selling Loopt, but most came from Peter Thiel, his mentor and main backer in Silicon Valley. Sam Altman invested 75 percent of the money in Y-Combinator companies. In 2023, when Hydrazine launched its fourth fund, the University of Michigan endowment was the only outside investor. Its investments in Hydrazine were the largest the endowment has made. Altman debuted on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in March 2024 with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, primarily from his venture capital funds related to Hydrazine Capital. He was invited to attend the Bilderberg Meeting in 2016, 2022, and 2023.

Altman had contemplated running for governor of California in the 2018 election, but later decided not to enter. In 2018, Altman announced "the United Slate", a political project to improve U.S. housing and healthcare policy. In 2019, Altman held a fundraiser at his home in San Francisco for 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and fellow tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang. In May 2020, Altman donated $250,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC supporting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

In 2021, Altman published a blog post titled "Moore's Law for Everything", which stated his belief that within ten years, AI could generate enough value to fund a universal basic income (UBI) of $13,500 per year to every adult in the United States. In 2024, he suggested a new kind of UBI called "universal basic compute" to give everyone a "slice" of ChatGPT's computing power. In an interview given to The Atlantic's CEO Nicholas Thompson in April 2026, Altman stated that he "no longer believe[s] in universal basic income as much as [he] once did".

In 2023, Altman was involved in boosting Representative Dean Phillips as he prepared a challenge to President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. On November 18, 2024, San Francisco Mayor-Elect Daniel Lurie named him to his transition team. In December 2024, Altman donated $1 million to the Inaugural Fund for President Donald Trump. Altman hosted a fundraiser in San Francisco on March 20, 2025, for Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat up for re-election in 2026 in Virginia.

On July 4, 2025, Altman said that he believed in "techno-capitalism" and found himself increasingly "politically homeless", criticizing the Democratic Party for no longer encouraging a "culture of innovation and entrepreneurship". In September 2025, Altman was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. The interview covered the death of former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji and the ideal moral alignment of AI.

Altman has been a vegetarian since childhood. He is gay, which he first disclosed at 17 in high school, where he spoke out after some students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. He dated Loopt co-founder Nick Sivo for nine years. They broke up shortly after the company was acquired in 2012.

According to Keach Hagey, Altman met his future husband Oliver Mulherin "in Peter Thiel's hot tub at 3 a.m." in 2015. Mulherin was a computer science student at the University of Melbourne at the time and later became an engineer. He worked on AI projects in Australia before moving to the United States to work for the dementia detection startup SPARK Neuro. Altman married Mulherin in January 2024 at their estate in Hawaii; the couple also live in Russian Hill, San Francisco and often spend weekends in Napa, California. The couple has a son, who was born in 2025 via surrogacy.