One of the world’s foremost advocates of artificial intelligence is Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI. A native of St. Louis, Altman may not look the part after dropping out of college, co-founding social mapping company Loopt, and becoming a venture capitalist. He co-founded OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, with Elon Musk and others in 2015, and took over as the company’s chief executive in 2019. He remains in that position, even after the company temporarily removed him in 2023. Outside of AI, Altman is a prolific investor and one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, thanks to investments in companies such as Reddit and Stripe.
Sam Altman’s Early Life and Family
Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago. He spent most of his youth in St. Louis, where his family moved when he was a boy. Sam’s mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist, and his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker. Sam is the first of the couple’s four children; he has two brothers, Jack and Max, and a sister, Annie.
Credit: New York Magazine. Family members were close, enjoying dinner together every evening and playing table tennis, billiards, and charades. All three of the Altman boys participated in water polo.
Connie remains a doctor, but Jerry passed away suddenly after suffering a heart attack in 2018. His death deeply affected Altman. “I had to hold his life together for a few minutes,” he said during an interview on the What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast. “So for us, we didn’t even get a time to stop and really catch our breath until like a week after that, to be like, holy sh––, I can’t believe this shit just happened.”
More like their older brother, Jack and Max grew up with an entrepreneurial inclination. Jack is a co-founder and was CEO of Lattice, a human resources platform he helped launch in 2015 and stepped down from in 2023. He is now a managing partner at Alt Capital, according to his LinkedIn profile. Max is a co-founder and managing partner at investment firm Saga Ventures.
Altman is already estranged from his sister, who has been open about dealing with mental health and financial struggles. Annie has said the family withheld money that her father left to her, and she has worked to support herself financially online and in person as a sex worker. Annie also hosts and produces All Humans Are Human’s podcast.
In January 2025, Annie sued Sam for sexually abusing her from the time she was 3. Sam, in a joint statement with his mother and brothers, labelled the allegations “utterly untrue” and countersued his sister for defamation. Both legal proceedings are ongoing.
Sam Altman’s Education
Altman was involved in technology since elementary school. He got his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, when he was 8 years old, and he learned to code it and take it apart.
“That was kind of the glory years of computers, you went, and immediately you could do whatever you want on this computer, and it was really easy to learn how to program the computer, and it was just like insane fun and excitement,” Altman told Stratechery. “My parents eventually got me a computer or us a computer at home, and I was always like a crazy nerd — like crazy nerd to the performance-of-nerd-dity, not the level of nerd-domnedness-just science stuff and math stuff and more computers.”
He took that passion into high school at the John Burroughs School, a private, college-prep institution in St. Louis. While there, he made friends with a computer science teacher who was interested in the future of artificial intelligence.
Altman, who attended Burroughs until graduating in 2003, then attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science. But two years later, at age 19, he dropped out to start Loopt, a smartphone application that allowed people to share their location with friends and peers. Altman later noted that his willingness to take the risk of leaving school, knowing he could still go back, had the potential rewards outweigh the risks of a traditional career path. “In today’s world, which has become extremely dynamic, the risk is too great not to try all of the things that have a chance of working out,” he said.
Sam Altman’s OpenAI Co-Founder
Altman became one of 11 co-founders of OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company, in December 2015. The organization’s mission is to “advance digital intelligence in a way that will benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by financial return.” Altman assumed the CEO position in 2019, after stepping down from YC.
OpenAI is the developer of ChatGPT, a generative chatbot that can answer written or spoken prompts and questions. In August 2025, OpenAI had about 700 million ChatGPT users per week and was reportedly valued at $500 billion.
Sam Altman’s Temporary Removal as CEO
The OpenAI board announced in November 2023 that it had removed Altman from his role as CEO. The company said in a news release that Altman “was not consistently forthcoming with respect to his communications with the board and therefore limited the ability of the board to fulfill its responsibilities.” But the board reached an agreement within five days, after more than 500 of its employees had signed an open letter threatening to leave and follow Altman to a new division at Microsoft, with which OpenAI had previously partnered.
Sam Altman’s Net Worth
As of January-2025, Forbes ranked Altman among the world’s 2,500 wealthiest people, estimating his net worth at $1.9 billion.
OpenAI was valued at $157 billion as recently as November 2024, but the vast majority of Altman’s Fortune is not tied up in the company. He took no equity in it when it launched in 2015 — something that previously troubled investors about his confidence in the venture — and earns just $76,000 annually as CEO. “If I were to go back in time, I would have taken [equity], just even a tiny bit, just so this question can never be asked again,” Altman said.
Instead, Sam Altman made much of his Fortune through investments, including his existing stakes in Stripe, Reddit, and Helion. His Reddit stake was worth $1.4 billion by October 2024, according to Fortune.
