Sam Altman

Biography

Sam Altman was born in Chicago in 1985 and grew up in Clayton, Missouri, where he learned to program as a child. He studied computer science at Stanford for two years before leaving in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing mobile app he ran as chief executive until it was sold to Green Dot in 2012 for $43.4 million.

He joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator as a part-time partner in 2011 and succeeded Paul Graham as its president in 2014, pushing it to fund more companies and more "hard technology" ventures; he left in 2019 amid partners' mistrust over his divided attention. Through Hydrazine Capital and personal investments he took stakes in hundreds of companies, among them Reddit, Stripe and the fusion company Helion Energy, and he co-founded the company behind the Worldcoin project.

In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others, and in 2019 became its full-time chief executive. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 made him a leading public figure of the AI boom; in 2023 he testified to the US Senate on AI oversight and toured world capitals. That November the board removed him for not being consistently candid, but a revolt by staff and investors returned him to the post within days under a new board. Musk later sued him and OpenAI over the company's turn toward profit and lost at trial in 2026.