Sam Altman

Samuel Harris “Sam” Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and chief executive officer of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization he co-founded in 2015. Born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Altman attended Stanford University but dropped out to launch Loopt, a mobile location-sharing application that was acquired in 2012. In 2011, he joined Y Combinator, becoming its president in 2014 and leading the startup accelerator until 2019, during which it backed companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.

Under Altman's stewardship at OpenAI, the organization developed foundational AI models such as GPT-3, DALL-E, and ChatGPT, the latter sparking global adoption after its 2022 debut and securing over $10 billion in funding from Microsoft. In October 2025, OpenAI completed a restructuring, renaming its nonprofit parent the OpenAI Foundation, which retained control of the for-profit subsidiary converted to a Delaware public benefit corporation named OpenAI Group PBC and received a 26% equity stake valued at approximately $130 billion; Microsoft obtained a 27% stake worth about $135 billion. Following a $6.6 billion secondary share sale, OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation. SoftBank fulfilled a $40 billion investment commitment. OpenAI reported annual recurring revenue exceeding $10 billion as of June 2025, with projections for more than $20 billion by year-end; ChatGPT achieved 800 million weekly active users by October 2025, with daily prompt volume exceeding 2 billion queries. These advancements have positioned OpenAI as a leader in generative AI, though Altman's net worth of approximately $2 billion stems from personal investments in firms like Uber, Stripe, and nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy, not from OpenAI equity.

Sam Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, into a Jewish family of Polish and Georgian American ancestry. His father, Jerry Altman (1950–2018), worked as a real estate broker, while his mother, Connie Gibstine, practiced as a dermatologist. Altman was the eldest of four siblings, including brothers Max and Jack, and sister Annie. His father passed away on May 25, 2018.