Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI

Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI

Business Owner · Artificial Intelligence

San Francisco

Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford to found Loopt, ran Y Combinator, and has led OpenAI as CEO since 2019, overseeing the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT. He was ousted and reinstated within five days in 2023.

About Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985, in Chicago) is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI since 2019. He was born to a Jewish American family; his mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist and his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker. He is the eldest of four siblings, and in 1989 the family moved to his father's hometown of Clayton, Missouri. At eight he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and began learning to code and to disassemble and examine hardware. He attended John Burroughs School in Ladue, Missouri. Altman studied at Stanford University for two years before dropping out to co-found Loopt, a geosocial networking app for smartphones, which Green Dot Corporation acquired for $43.4 million in March 2012. In 2011 he joined the startup accelerator and venture firm Y Combinator, serving as its president from 2014 to 2019. He is a billionaire through investments in more than 400 companies, including Reddit, Worldcoin, Helion Energy and Instacart. Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its CEO in 2019, a role that made him a prominent figure of the AI boom, and supervised the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. In 2023 the organization's board ousted him for not being "consistently candid"; the move met significant backlash from employees and investors, and Altman was reinstated five days later under a new board. Sources: English Wikipedia (Sam Altman, accessed September 2026).

Basic Information

CEO, OpenAI; former president, Y Combinator

Company Details

OpenAI

Artificial Intelligence, Venture Capital