Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman (born 22 April 1985) founded a location-sharing app, ran Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and co-founded OpenAI in 2015 while still holding the YC job — becoming its chief executive in 2019. Three institutions run through the career, Loopt, Y Combinator and OpenAI, and all three were run on the same pattern: assemble capital and people around a market that does not yet exist.

Loopt and Y Combinator

Altman was born in Chicago; the family moved to Clayton, Missouri in 1989. He studied computer science at Stanford for two years and left without a degree. In 2005, aged nineteen, he co-founded Loopt, a location-based social application, and it became one of the companies in Y Combinator's very first batch. On 9 March 2012 Green Dot Corporation announced it would acquire Loopt for total consideration of US$43.4 million in cash, of which roughly US$9.8 million was set aside as a retention pool for key employees.

On 21 February 2014 Paul Graham named Altman his successor on the Y Combinator blog. The reasoning was blunt: "Because YC needs to grow, and I'm not the best person to grow it." Altman was president until March 2019, when he stepped back to concentrate on OpenAI.

Founding OpenAI, and the move to CEO

The launch announcement of 11 December 2015, "Introducing OpenAI", listed Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, Ilya Sutskever as research director, and Greg Brockman as CTO. The donors were those three plus Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research, who together committed US$1 billion — though the announcement itself noted the organisation expected "to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years".

Altman became chief executive in 2019, when OpenAI created its capped-profit arm. Microsoft's US$1 billion investment, the launch of ChatGPT, the 2023 extension of the Microsoft partnership, and Stargate were all decisions taken under that structure.

On 16 May 2023 he testified to the US Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, arguing that "the US government might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities". The image of an AI chief executive asking to be regulated dates from that hearing.

November 2023 — removed and reinstated

On 17 November 2023 OpenAI's board announced Altman's removal. The only reason its statement gave was that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities". The five days that followed are covered in The OpenAI Coup.

What matters biographically is that the internal record still does not agree with itself: the accounts given by the people in the room diverge, and no single reconstruction has been accepted by all of them. Altman's own note to the company on his return took the opposite of a scorched-earth line towards Sutskever, who had voted to remove him — "I love and respect Ilya… I harbor zero ill will towards him." The new initial board was Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers, and the sole holdover Adam D'Angelo, and rebuilding the governance became the work of the following two years.

The recapitalisation of 28 October 2025

OpenAI completed a recapitalisation that renamed the non-profit the OpenAI Foundation and converted the for-profit into a public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC. The Foundation still controls the Group; at announcement it held equity valued at roughly US$130 billion and committed an initial US$25 billion to health research and to what it calls AI resilience. Altman sits on the Foundation's board as CEO alongside its independent directors. Microsoft said the same day that it held about 27 percent of OpenAI Group PBC, worth roughly US$135 billion.

Now

The same October 2025 agreement removed Microsoft's right of first refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider, loosening the single-cloud arrangement that had held since 2019. On 28 July 2026, on the podcast Invest Like the Best, Altman said that "we may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels", while "trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs". Coming from someone who declined to sign the 2023 letter calling for a training pause, that is a visible change of position.

Outside OpenAI he chairs the fusion company Helion Energy and co-founded Worldcoin, which pairs iris-based identity with a cryptocurrency. Partnership terms with Microsoft, proximity to Washington, the design of a capital structure: most of Altman's work has not been research but the procurement of the conditions under which research can continue.