Sam’s mother, Connie Gibstine, works as a dermatologist, while his father, Jerry Altman, was a real estate broker. Sam is the oldest of the couple’s four children; he has two brothers, Jack and Max, and a sister, Annie. According to New York Magazine, the close-knit family ate dinner together every night and bonded through games such as table tennis, billiards, and charades. The three Altman boys also played water polo.

While Connie is still a practicing doctor, Jerry died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 2018. His death deeply affected Altman. “I had to pick up the pieces of his life for a little while,” he said in an interview on the What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast. “And it wasn’t until like a week after that, that I really got a moment to just catch my breath and be like, holy sh––, I can’t believe this happened.”

As adults, Jack and Max developed an entrepreneurial spirit similar to their older brother. Jack co-founded the human resources platform Lattice in 2015 and served as CEO before stepping down in 2023. According to his LinkedIn profile, he now serves as a managing partner at Alt Capital. Max is a co-founder and managing partner at the investment firm Saga Ventures.

Altman is estranged from his sister, who has been candid about her mental health and financial struggles. Annie has said the family kept money left to her by her father, and she has supported herself financially through online and in-person sex work. Annie also created and hosts the All Humans Are Human podcast.

In January 2025, Annie filed a lawsuit alleging Sam had sexually abused her starting when she was 3 years old. Sam released a joint statement with his mother and brothers calling the claims “utterly untrue” and countersued his sister for defamation. Both legal proceedings are ongoing.

Altman developed an interest in technology while in elementary school. At age 8, he received his first computer, an Apple Macintosh, and learned how to code and deconstruct its hardware.

“That was like the glory days of computing, you could immediately do whatever you wanted on the computer, and it was very easy to learn to program, and it was just crazy fun and exciting,” Altman told Stratechery. “Eventually my parents got me a computer or got us a computer at home, and I was always a crazy nerd, like crazy nerd in like the full sense, just science and math and computers and sci-fi and all of that stuff.”

That passion continued into his high school tenure at the John Burroughs School, a private college prep school in St. Louis. While there, Altman befriended a computer science teacher who shared an interest in the future of artificial intelligence.

After graduating from Burroughs in 2003, Altman enrolled at Stanford University to study computer science. However, he dropped out two years later at age 19 to create Loopt, an application allowing smartphone users to share their location with friends and colleagues. Altman later said he found the risks of leaving school—and knowing he could always return—worth the potential rewards of forgoing a traditional career path. “In what is now a very dynamic world, the risky thing is to not go try the things that might really work out,” he said.

Sam Altman, seen here in 2015, became a tech entrepreneur and investor in his early 20s.

Altman eventually sold Loopt to banking company Green Dot in 2012 for $43.4 million. However, that was far from his only business project. That same year, Altman used the money from the sale to launch the investment firm Hydrazine, cleverly named after the chemical used in rocket fuel, with his brother Jack.

Since 2010, Altman has personally invested in 125 companies, according to The Washington Post. They include Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion researcher; Retro Biosciences, a biotechnology company specializing in cell restoration; and Cruise, a self-driving car company.

In 2011, Altman became a partner at Y Combinator, a juggernaut among technology startup accelerators and venture capital firms, and was promoted to president in February 2014. YC has invested in more than 5,000 companies, with DoorDash, Airbnb, Instacart, Twitch, and Reddit among the most recognizable. By December 2015, Altman valued all YC companies at more than $65 billion. Altman eventually stepped down from his role as president in 2019 to focus on another burgeoning venture.

In December 2015, Altman became one of 11 co-founders of OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company whose goal is to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” Altman took control as CEO in 2019 after leaving YC.

OpenAI is known for creating ChatGPT, a generative chatbot able to respond to written or spoken prompts and questions. As of August 2025, OpenAI has reported roughly 700 million weekly ChatGPT users and is reportedly seeking a valuation of $500 billion.

Temporary Removal as CEO

In November 2023, the OpenAI board announced it had fired Altman as CEO. In a news release, the company said Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” However, after more than 500 OpenAI employees signed an open letter threatening to leave the company and follow Altman to a new division at Microsoft, the board reached an agreement within five days of his firing for Altman to return to his leadership position.

Despite the controversy, Altman has solidified his status as a leading figure in the AI space. Following the creation of ChatGPT, Time included him on its 2023 list of the 100 most influential people. That same year, he testified before U.S. Congress and urged lawmakers to create regulations for the expanding industry.

Feud with Elon Musk

Elon Musk and Sam Altman both cofounded OpenAI but, in recent years, have publicly feuded over their differing priorities for artificial intelligence.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk initially served as an OpenAI co-chair with Altman, but the pair became mired in a public rift over the latter’s direction for the company. Under Altman’s guidance, OpenAI began taking on investors and making money through a for-profit subsidiary—contradictory to the company’s for-the-greater-good mission. Musk stepped down from the board in 2018 and later created the xAI program, a direct competitor to OpenAI.

Then in 2024, Musk escalated his feud by filing two separate lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, accusing the company of fraud, breach of contract, and reserving some of its most promising technology for private users. Musk also began derisively referring to the CEO as “Scam Altman.”

OpenAI has denied many of the claims in Musk’s litigation. “I wish he would just compete by building the better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff,” Altman said. “We’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”

OpenAI ultimately abandoned plans to create a public benefit corporation, which would have taken control of the company away from its nonprofit branch, in 2025.

According to Forbes, Altman is one of the 2,500 richest people in the world with an estimated net worth of $1.9 billion as of August 20, 2025.

Although OpenAI was valued at $157 billion as recently as November 2024, the vast majority of Altman’s fortune doesn’t stem from the company. He didn’t take any equity upon its 2015 launch—which previously caused concern among investors over his confidence in the venture—and only makes $76,000 per year as CEO. “If I could go back in time, I would have taken [equity], just some little bit, just to never have to answer this question,” Altman said.

Instead, Altman owes much of his wealth to investments, including his stakes in Stripe, Reddit, and Helion. According to Fortune, the value of his Reddit shares alone climbed to $1.4 billion by October 2024.

Sam Altman married Oliver Mulherin in 2024.

Altman married Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, in January 2024.

The pair met at a party in 2015 and immediately connected despite dating other people at the time. Once Altman and Mulherin were a couple, they split their time between San Francisco and a ranch in Napa, California.

Altman has spoken about their future plans, telling The San Francisco Standard they hope to build a family with multiple children. “I am more excited for that than I think I’ve ever been for anything,” Altman said. “Let’s start with a few [kids] and see how it goes, but maybe a lot.” The couple welcomed their first son through a surrogate in February 2025.

Coming out as gay around age 17 was an unusually anxiety-producing experience for Altman. In addition to telling his parents, he shared his sexual orientation with his classmates during a high school assembly. “I don’t really get nervous for stuff, and I was so nervous to do this. Because I was like, mostly out. Most people knew about it, but it was not the kind of school where you would really stand up and talk about being gay and that was okay,” he told Mostly Human Media. “I got a long standing ovation out of it and, sort of all day at school that day, people telling me how much it meant to them.”

Altman considered running for governor of California in 2018 but eventually declined to seek the office. He affirmed his belief in “techno-capitalism” and has advocated for universal basic income but also described himself as “politically homeless” in 2025.

• The most expensive investing mistake in the world to make is to be a pessimist, and it’s a common one. I think that’s actually the most common mistake to make in life.
• We can manage [AI], I am confident about that. But we won’t successfully manage it if we’re not extremely vigilant about the risks, and if we don’t talk very frankly about how badly it could go wrong.
• We seem to be really great as a society, as individuals, as a species at dealing with change and with technological change. You know, think about how different the world was 20 years ago. We didn’t all have smartphones, and that seems unimaginable now.
• I do think there’s something freeing about getting older and caring less what people think.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us!

Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he’s not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.