Sam Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most influential and polarizing figures in technology.

Over two decades he has gone from a teenage app founder to the head of Silicon Valley’s most powerful startup accelerator to the face of the AI boom. Now 41, he is shaping how the world builds, funds and argues about artificial intelligence.

Who is Sam Altman?

Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago and grew up in the St. Louis area of Missouri. He is the eldest of four siblings; his mother is a dermatologist and his father worked in real estate.

He got his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, at age eight and taught himself to code and to take hardware apart. He attended the John Burroughs School in Ladue, Missouri, before enrolling at Stanford University to study computer science.

Loopt and Y Combinator

Altman dropped out of Stanford in 2005 and, at 19, co-founded Loopt, a location-sharing mobile app. Loopt was part of the very first batch of startups funded by Y Combinator and went on to raise more than $30 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. It never found a large enough user base, and in March 2012 it was sold to Green Dot for $43.4 million.

That year he and his brother Jack launched Hydrazine Capital, a venture fund. In 2011 he had become a partner at Y Combinator, and in 2014 its founder Paul Graham chose him to succeed Graham as president. Under Altman the accelerator expanded aggressively and added a growth-stage fund. He left the role in 2019 to focus on OpenAI, though accounts differ on how smooth the exit was.

Building OpenAI

Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk and others as a nonprofit research lab. Musk left the board in 2018, and the two have since become bitter rivals.

Altman became CEO in 2019, and the company released GPT-3 in 2020 and the DALL-E image generator in 2021. ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, and became one of the fastest-adopted software products ever, setting off the current AI race among Microsoft, Google, Meta and others.

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What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and development company. It launched ChatGPT in November 2022, helping spark a global boom in generative AI and accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence across industries.

OpenAI is currently valued at approximately $1.25 trillion, following a new funding round in which the company secured $11 billion in November 2026, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by Reuters. However, Sam Altman does not hold direct equity in OpenAI.

What is Sam Altman’s net worth?

According to the latest available Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List, as of Nov 6, 2026, Sam Altman’s estimated net worth is $3.1 billion.

His primary source of wealth is investments, particularly his venture capital investments in technology and startup companies.

Altman has invested in hundreds of companies, including Stripe, Airbnb and other technology startups. His wealth is largely built through these investments rather than his role as CEO of OpenAI. He does not hold direct equity in OpenAI.

Some of his notable investments include Stripe, nuclear fusion company Helion Energy and biotechnology company Retro Biosciences. According to a 2026 Reuters report, Altman had sold his stake in Reddit by the end of 2025.

Sam Altman Net Worth By Year

The 2023 firing

On Nov 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board abruptly removed Altman, saying he had not been consistently candid in his communications with directors.

Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear was named interim CEO, but employee and investor pressure including from Microsoft, pushed the board to reverse course within days. Altman was reinstated and OpenAI announced his official return alongside a new initial board on November 29, 2023.

Personal life

Altman married his partner Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, in 2024. They have a son and split their time between San Francisco and a ranch in Napa, California.

Personal Stats

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