One of the most powerful figures in artificial intelligence (AI) today, Sam Altman is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, executive, and visionary. He is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a revolutionary chatbot and one of the fastest-growing apps in history.
Previously, he headed Y Combinator, a tech incubator that provided seed funding to companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. In addition, he has served as an angel investor to more than 100 startups, including Asana, Instacart, and Pinterest.
While efforts to obtain government funding for his AI ventures have been unsuccessful to date, Altman insists on making sure regulators understand this new technology—he even provided a demonstration of ChatGPT to members of the U.S. Congress—and in Congressional testimony called for an increased oversight of AI technology.
What is Sam Altman’s net worth? Is he a billionaire?
While in Washington, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Altman if he made a lot of money. Altman replied that he did not.
“I’m paid enough for health insurance and have no equity in OpenAI… I’m doing this because I love it.”
—Sam Altman, testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, & the Law, May 16, 2023
Just like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, Altman dropped out of college to build a tech startup. And just like Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, leaving college didn’t prevent Altman from amassing a fortune—his net worth is estimated to be between $500 and $700 million, the result of his entrepreneurial ventures as well as some very smart investments.
How did Sam Altman make his money?
Most of Altman’s net worth is tied to equity ownership in privately held companies, making it difficult to pinpoint his true net worth. However, the companies he has led, founded, or backed are worth a combined $500 billion.
Loopt
The former Stanford computer science major’s first venture was Loopt, a location-based social networking app that he co-founded in 2005 at the tender age of 19, writing much of its original code. The app’s technology was adopted by Apple and Blackberry before being acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in 2012.
Y Combinator
Altman’s involvement with Y Combinator (YC) began as a part-time job in 2011. Known as one of the world’s most prestigious startup accelerators, Y Combinator has an acceptance rate of less than 2% of its applicants. It has provided seed money and networking resources to more than 4,000 startups since the early 2000s, many of which—like Doordash, Dropbox, and Reddit—have grown to become household names.
During his time there, Altman turned Demo Day, where YC startups made presentations to venture capitalists, into a Hollywood spectacle, inviting tech superstars like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to speak and provide encouragement. For Altman, being a YC company was more than a job; it was a lifestyle—he rented warehouses and hosted week-long coding and networking retreats, which fostered collaboration and inspiration among startups.
Altman dismantled the often-insulated boundaries of Silicon Valley by welcoming startups from the biotech and clean energy fields as well as entrepreneurs representing diverse backgrounds. Altman was promoted to President in 2014, and in 2015, Forbes named him to their list of 30-under-30 venture capitalists.
The valuation of Y Combinator’s companies is estimated to be at least $600 billion as of January 2023. Considering that Altman himself also invested in these startups, it’s plain to see how quickly he has accumulated major wealth.
For a brief, eight-day period in 2015, Altman was the acting CEO of Reddit, taking the reins after its CEO, Yishan Wong, resigned and before its previous leader, Steve Huffman, reclaimed his old job. Reddit was also a Y Combinator startup; Altman was its lead investor in round-B funding in 2014 worth $50 million, as well as a participant in its C-series funding in 2017, worth $200 million. In addition, he served on its board from 2014 to 2022.
OpenAI
In 2015, a group of tech leaders, including Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, started a nonprofit AI research laboratory called OpenAI, with Altman as its CEO.
AI has proved to be a tipping point for businesses, as it makes it possible to create personalized services on a massive scale. Altman and Co’s goal with OpenAI was to make AI accessible to everyone. The company released an early demo of the chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, and by May 2023, Altman stated in his Congressional testimony that the company’s valuation was $29 billion.
At its beginnings, $1 billion in seed money was pledged to OpenAI by a group of investors including Altman, Musk, Peter Thiel (PayPal’s founder), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn’s co-founder), Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator’s founding partner), Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. Their mandate was to make OpenAI’s patents and research publicly accessible, and they released OpenAI’s first public beta platform in 2016.
Who owns OpenAI?
OpenAI transitioned from nonprofit to for-profit status in 2019, which allowed it to attract investment from venture funds and offer company stakes to employees. It then partnered with Microsoft, announcing a $1 billion investment in July 2019. As of September 2023, OpenAI remains privately held; some of its shareholders include Microsoft, a venture capital firm called Khosla Ventures, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.
How much of OpenAI does Elon Musk own?
Citing a conflict of interest between OpenAI and Tesla, which uses AI in its self-driving cars, Musk resigned from OpenAI in February 2018, although he promised to continue to provide funding to the company.
Altman has said that Musk helped to attract both talent and attention to the company, although Musk has been critical of the direction OpenAI has taken since, launching a competing venture, xAI, in July 2023.
