Sam Altman

• 1. Introduction

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  Sam Altman got his first computer at age eight: an Apple Macintosh. Within a few years he was disassembling it to examine the hardware inside. That childhood instinct to open things up and understand how they work has since made Altman one of the most consequential figures in the history of artificial intelligence.

  Born in Chicago on the 22nd of April 1985, Altman grew up in Clayton, Missouri, in a family shaped by medicine and real estate. His mother Connie Gibstine is a dermatologist; his father Jerry was a real estate broker. He studied computer science at Stanford for two years, then dropped out without a degree. By nineteen he had already co-founded his first company. By the time ChatGPT launched in November 2022, he was responsible for the AI tool that reached one million users in five days.

  But the path from that first Macintosh to the CEO's office at OpenAI runs through episodes that raise persistent questions about candor, loyalty, and the kind of power that accumulates when a single person sits at the intersection of technology, capital, and politics. Who is Sam Altman, really? And how did one person end up at the center of so many of the defining arguments about artificial intelligence?

• 2. Loopt and the First Falls

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  At nineteen, in 2005, Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking app that tried to let users see where their friends were in real time. The company bought geolocation data from cellular providers. It was early and ambitious. Altman raised more than $30 million in venture capital, starting with a $5 million investment from Patrick Chung of Xfund and his team at New Enterprise Associates, followed by money from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.

  The board of Loopt tried twice to remove Altman from his role as CEO. Both times his supporters defended him and insisted the attempts were not serious. The company never gained significant traction with users. In March 2012, Loopt was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.

  During those years, Altman also dated Loopt co-founder Nick Sivo for nine years. They broke up shortly after the acquisition. The pattern at Loopt of governance tension and personal entanglement with the company was not something Altman left behind. Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, would later allege that Loopt's management team had also asked twice to fire Altman for what they called "deceptive and chaotic behavior."

• 3. Building Y Combinator

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  Paul Graham had been Altman's mentor. In February 2014, Altman replaced him as president of Y Combinator. He came in with an explicit expansion goal: fund 1,000 new companies per year, with a particular focus on what he called "hard technology" startups. He invested in companies including Stripe, Inc.

  In September 2016, his role grew to president of YC Group, encompassing Y Combinator and additional units. But by 2018, his attention was shifting. Several YC partners complained to Graham that Altman was using his position to claim priority in investment opportunities. Graham later stated he was "unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners' mistrust."

  When YC moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 2019, Altman and YC began claiming publicly that he had transitioned to a less hands-on chairman role to focus on OpenAI. That framing, Graham later made clear, was false. Altman had been removed. The same year, he left entirely and began serving as CEO of OpenAI full time. The mentorship had ended in mistrust. His experience with investment, however, had only deepened: by June 2024, his portfolio would include stakes in more than 400 companies, valued at around $2.8 billion.

• 4. Founding OpenAI

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  OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit. Its founders included Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, and institutional backers including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. Altman's particular contribution in the early days was recruitment. He tenaciously pursued Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, offering Y Combinator stock to persuade them.

  In his early conversations with Musk, Altman framed OpenAI as a counterweight to Google's AI development. The two modeled their strategy loosely on the Manhattan Project, focused on attracting the best researchers and arguing that they were acting to protect humanity against the existential risks of AI. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised pledges for $1 billion. By 2019, OpenAI acknowledged that only $130 million of those pledged funds had actually been collected.

  Sutskever had reservations about Altman from the start. He opposed Altman taking a full AI leadership role because Altman's motivations were unclear and because it raised the possibility, in Sutskever's view, of an "AI dictator." The three leaders made an informal agreement that Altman would step down if both Sutskever and Brockman requested it. Altman himself stated in 2015 that the lab might ultimately need "more capital than any non-profit has ever raised" to reach artificial general intelligence.

• 5. The November Coup

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  On the 17th of November 2023, OpenAI's board announced it had removed Altman as CEO. The board at that moment was composed of researcher Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI governance advocate Tasha McCauley, and Ilya Sutskever. The stated reason was that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications." Greg Brockman resigned as president the same day.

  Altman returned to his home and coordinated with consultant Chris Lehane, Airbnb executive Brian Chesky, and a team of staff to build a reinstatement strategy. By his own account, he was focused on damaging the reputation of interim CEO Mira Murati. The board began discussing bringing him back the very next day.

  On the 20th of November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. Two days later, more than 700 of OpenAI's 770 total employees signed an open letter threatening to leave and join Microsoft unless all board members resigned and Altman was reinstated. Ilya Sutskever, who had initially supported the firing, reversed course and posted on Twitter: "I regret my participation in the board's actions."

• 6. Investments Beyond OpenAI

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  In April 2012, Altman co-founded Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack. The initial $21 million fund drew heavily from the $5 million he received selling Loopt, with most of the remaining capital coming from Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75 percent of the money in Y Combinator companies. When Hydrazine launched its fourth fund in 2023, the University of Michigan endowment was the only outside investor, and the investments Hydrazine made were the largest the endowment had ever made.

  Altman also co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019 with Alex Blania, promoting the Worldcoin cryptocurrency and iris-scanning systems designed to provide proof of personhood. By 2023, the company had scanned two million people's eyes and raised $250 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Bankman-Fried. Regulators in France, the United Kingdom, Bavaria, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, and Hong Kong investigated or suspended Worldcoin over concerns about biometric data privacy. The company has never offered Worldcoin in the United States.

  For eight days in 2014, Altman also served as CEO of Reddit after CEO Yishan Wong resigned. Before Reddit's initial public offering in 2024, Altman was listed as its third-largest shareholder, holding around 9 percent of the company. He debuted on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in March 2024 with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.

• 7. Politics, Power, and Personal Life

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  Altman has been a vegetarian since childhood. He is gay, and came out at age seventeen in high school after students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. He met his future husband Oliver Mulherin, then a computer science student at the University of Melbourne, in 2015. Mulherin later became an engineer and 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 signed The Giving Pledge in May 2024, committing to give away most of their wealth. They have a son, born in 2025.

  Altman supports universal basic income. In a 2021 blog post titled "Moore's Law for Everything", he argued that within ten years, AI could generate enough value to fund a UBI of $13,500 per year to every adult in the United States. He donated $250,000 to American Bridge 21st Century in May 2020 to support Joe Biden's presidential campaign, and $1 million to the Inaugural Fund for President Donald Trump in December 2024. In July 2025, he described himself as increasingly "politically homeless."

  On the 10th of April 2026, a twenty-year-old man from The Woodlands, Texas, was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Altman's California home. Two days later, shots were fired at the same home. Altman was uninjured. In a blog post, he connected the attack to opposition to artificial intelligence and cited what he described as "an incendiary article written about me a few days ago", apparently referring to a New Yorker investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz. Altman is also chairman of Journey Colab, a psychedelic pharmaceutical startup developing mescaline for medical use, and has said that experiences with psychedelic drugs changed him from a formerly "very anxious, unhappy person" into what he describes as "a very calm person now."