Sam Altman

Like many great entrepreneurs, Sam Altman isn’t afraid of taking risks. As a computer science student at Stanford University, this meant dropping out early to start his own company, Loopt. At school, it was a five minute speech to his entire school assembly about being gay. Today, it’s charting a new course for our relationship with technology, as chief executive of OpenAI, the company that brought us ChatGPT.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1985 but grew up in St Louis, Missouri. The son of a dermatologist and a real estate broker, he showed early promise in computing, learning to program as a child using his first computer, an Apple Macintosh. He studied computer science at Stanford University, but left early with two classmates to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking app. Loopt became one of Y Combinator’s first companies, along with Reddit.

It was this encounter with Y Combinator (YC) that gave Sam his first big opportunity. Having been made a partner of the accelerator in 2011, founder Paul Graham chose him as his successor in 2014. Under his leadership, YC expanded globally and began funding more ambitious, long-term science and infrastructure ventures. Altman also launched YC Continuity, a growth-stage investment fund, and YC Research, a nonprofit lab supporting deep research.

In 2015, Sam co-founded OpenAI alongside Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others. Their mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab but later evolved into a capped-profit model to attract the capital needed for large-scale AI development.

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 marked a cultural and commercial turning point, bringing AI into the mainstream. The platform reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch in November. This made it the fastest growing consumer application in history. In 2025, it is averaging 100 million users per day.

In November 2023, OpenAI's board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman, citing a loss of confidence due to his lack of consistent candor in communications, which hindered the board's ability to fulfil its responsibilities. The decision led to significant backlash: President Greg Brockman resigned, and over 700 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatened to quit unless Altman was reinstated. Facing immense pressure from staff and major investors like Microsoft, the board reversed its decision five days later, reinstating Altman as CEO and restructuring the board.

On top of steering Open AI, as it continues to grow in user base and capabilities, Sam has become a prolific investor. As well as AI, his investment interests hit on energy and nuclear fusion, biotech and other frontier science areas such as quantum. In 2021, he invested $375m into fusion power company Helion – his largest personal investment in a single business. His hope is that abundant, clean fusion energy could “lead to a dramatically better quality of life for many people.”