Sam Altman was 19 when Paul Graham, a co-founder of Y Combinator, compared him to a young Bill Gates. Nearly a decade later Graham picked him to run the accelerator. It was a long way from a suburb of St. Louis, and the road was not smooth.
A Chicago birth, a Missouri childhood
Altman was born in Chicago in April 1985, the eldest of four children. The family moved to Clayton, Missouri, when he was small. He got his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, at eight and set about teaching himself to code and to take hardware apart. At John Burroughs School, a private college-preparatory school, he came out as gay and gave a speech to his classmates on National Coming Out Day.
Loopt and Y Combinator
He enrolled at Stanford in 2003 to study computer science. Two years later Y Combinator picked his pitch for its Summer Founders Program, and he left without a degree. The startup, Loopt, was a location app that let people see where their friends were, two years before the first iPhone. It raised tens of millions of dollars and signed carriers such as Sprint and Verizon, but users never came in numbers. Green Dot bought it in 2012 for $43.4 million.
Altman became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, part-time at first. In February 2014 he replaced Graham as president. YC had by then backed more than 600 startups, Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe among them. Altman enlarged the cohorts, launched the YC Continuity Fund for alumni and gave $10 million to start YC Research, which would later support OpenAI.
His tenure ended badly. According to The New Yorker, investors told Graham that Altman’s personal stakes in YC companies crowded others out of funding rounds, and Graham felt Altman’s OpenAI work clashed with his YC duties. In March 2019 Altman left to run OpenAI full time.
OpenAI and the 2023 firing
Altman, Elon Musk and four other co-founders launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, worried that Google DeepMind was not putting safety first in the race toward artificial general intelligence. Pledges at launch totalled $1 billion. In 2019, OpenAI said $130 million of it had been collected. When the need for computing power pushed the founders toward a for-profit arm, Musk left and Altman became CEO. Microsoft put in an initial $1 billion. ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, and Microsoft added another $10 billion in January 2023.
In November 2023 the board fired him. Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, helped by then-CTO Mira Murati, had given directors evidence that Altman misrepresented facts about internal safety protocols, The New Yorker reported. The board said he had not been “consistently candid.” Greg Brockman resigned in protest, and more than 700 employees signed a petition demanding Altman’s return. Within the week the board was replaced and Altman was back. Time named him CEO of the Year that December.
Musk sued in 2024, arguing OpenAI had broken its founding agreement by turning for-profit. He lost. In October 2025 OpenAI restructured as a public benefit corporation.
Money and what comes next
Altman holds no equity in OpenAI and reportedly draws a salary of $76,001. Forbes puts his net worth at $3.4 billion, built mostly on roughly 400 investments in other companies, among them Stripe, Airbnb, Uber, Reddit and Helion Energy. He put $375 million into the fusion startup Helion in 2021 and $180 million into the longevity company Retro Biosciences in 2022. He told MIT Technology Review he had “basically just took all my liquid net worth and put it into” the two.
OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion, and Altman has said a public offering below $1 trillion is a non-starter. On the Big Technology Podcast he said he is “zero percent excited” about running a public company. In June 2026 the company announced a partnership with Broadcom on its first AI chip, called Jalapeño, due to be deployed by the end of 2026.
