Short answers, pulled from the story.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit called OpenAI, Inc., with Elon Musk and Sam Altman serving as co-chairs alongside Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and eight other researchers. A total of $1 billion was pledged by its founders and early backers, though only $133.2 million had actually been received by 2021.
The OpenAI Foundation, a nonprofit, holds a 26 percent stake in the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Microsoft holds 27 percent, and the remaining 47 percent belongs to employees and other investors.
OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO on the 17th of November 2023, citing a lack of confidence in him. He was reinstated on the 21st of November after 738 of the company's 770 employees threatened to quit and follow him to Microsoft.
Microsoft invested over $13 billion in OpenAI across multiple rounds beginning in 2019. After the 2025 restructuring, its stake in OpenAI Group PBC was valued at $135 billion.
OpenAI has released the GPT family of language models, the DALL-E and Sora image and video models, the ChatGPT chatbot, the Whisper speech recognition system, and the Codex coding tool.
OpenAI has faced copyright suits from authors including George R. R. Martin and John Grisham and from the New York Times, along with wrongful-death lawsuits such as Raine v. OpenAI filed in August 2025. A jury also ruled against cofounder Elon Musk's lawsuit against the company on the 18th of May 2026.