Meet OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who learned to code at 8 and is a doomsday prepper with a stash of gold, guns, and gas masks
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the buzzy AI firm he cofounded with Elon Musk.
Before that, he was well known in Silicon Valley as president of startup accelerator Y-Combinator.
Here's how the serial entrepreneur got his start — and ended up helming one of today's most-watched companies.
Sam Altman, 37, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old.
He attended John Burroughs School, a private, non-sectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.
Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before he and two of his classmates dropped out to work full time on their mobile app, Loopt, that shared a user's location with their friends.
Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit.
Loopt eventually reached a $175 million valuation, but it didn't garner enough interest, so the founders sold it for $43 million in 2012.
After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million. That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the startup accelerator.
While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup," in the fall of 2014.
In 2015, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at age 29.
After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch. He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.
Altman once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. He also said he likes renting planes and flying them all over California.
Altman has a brother, Jack, who is a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform. Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies.
In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX at the time. Their goal for the non-profit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humans.
Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI along with Altman and Musk, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Peter Thiel.
After the 2016 election, Altman, who tweeted that he voted against Donald Trump, said he decided to talk to 100 Trump supporters around the US to understand what they did and didn't like about the president. He also wanted to know "what would convince them not to vote for him in the future."
Altman stepped down as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He stayed in a chairman role at the accelerator.
At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."
Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it turned away from being a nonprofit company into a "capped profit" corporation.
Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI's AI models for him, WSJ reported. After that, OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.
Current and former insiders at OpenAI told Fortune that after Altman took over as CEO, and after the investment from Microsoft, the company started focusing more on developing natural language processing.
On October 21, 2021, Altman and his cofounders, Alex Blania and Max Novendstern, launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin, which wanted to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb.
ChatGPT was made public so OpenAI could use feedback from users to improve the bot. A few days after its launch, Altman tweeted that it "is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness."
In January, Microsoft again announced it was making a "multibillion dollar" investment into OpenAI. Although specifics of the investment were not shared, it is believed Microsoft's investment is worth $10 billion.
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