Sam Altman Net Worth

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company behind ChatGPT, GPT-4, and DALL-E, which ignited the global AI revolution beginning in late 2022. Born in Chicago and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Altman showed an early aptitude for technology, learning to code at age eight and disassembling his family's Macintosh to understand how it worked.

At 19, Altman dropped out of Stanford University to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking app that was accepted into Y Combinator's first-ever batch in 2005. Though Loopt was eventually acqui-hired by Green Dot Corporation for $43 million, the experience connected Altman to the Silicon Valley ecosystem that would define his career. In 2014, at just 28 years old, he was handpicked by Paul Graham to succeed him as president of Y Combinator, where he oversaw investments in over 2,000 startups including Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, and DoorDash.

Altman became CEO of OpenAI in 2019, transforming it from a nonprofit research lab into the fastest-growing technology company in history. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months after launch — the fastest adoption of any consumer application ever. In November 2023, Altman was briefly fired by OpenAI's board, only to be reinstated days later after nearly the entire company threatened to resign, in what became one of the most dramatic corporate governance episodes in Silicon Valley history. Under his leadership, OpenAI has raised tens of billions of dollars and is valued at over $150 billion, making it the most valuable private company in the world.