Co-founder and boss of OpenAI. His husband is Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer. He grew up in the American Midwest and at 17 revealed his homosexuality at a school assembly to promote gay rights. His first venture was Loopt, a location-tracking phone app, which he sold for $43m in 2012. Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup incubator Y Combinator (YC), handed him the reins at 28, elevating him to a position of near-unrivalled power in the Silicon Valley startup scene. He co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and others in 2015 while still running YC; his moonlighting eventually led to his departure from the incubator.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 he has become a global business celebrity, courted by both the Davos set and Silicon Valley's techno-utopians. He accompanied Donald Trump on a visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2025. He told the Financial Times he has the "coolest, most important job maybe in history". His large bets beyond OpenAI include a cryptocurrency backed by eye scans to certify digital identity, life-extension through cellular-rejuvenation technology, nuclear fusion and Conception, a company working on technology that would allow two men to become biological parents of a child.
In November 2023 the company's non-profit board temporarily ousted him after his top lieutenants and the board lost trust in him; he returned triumphantly days later when they realised the company might collapse without him. The board has since been expanded with people sympathetic to his ambitions. In May 2025 Altman announced that OpenAI had abandoned its planned conversion into a conventional for-profit company, a reversal he said would still allow the firm to secure the funding it needs. Musk has pursued a vendetta against Altman, including an unsolicited $97bn bid for OpenAI's non-profit assets and a lawsuit to block its restructuring.
He has written for years about how AI could create a world where no one need work, and about how clever taxes and some form of universal basic income might help redistribute the enormous gains of AI progress to everyone.
Despite being one of AI's most fervent evangelists, Altman has acknowledged the possibility that investors are collectively overexcited about AI. "Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes," he said.
In April 2026 Altman's house was attacked twice in quick succession, amid growing public hostility to AI and its leading figures.
The trial Elon Musk v Sam Altman et al began in a Californian courtroom on April 27th 2026. Musk's central allegation is that Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, "stole a charity" and enriched themselves with the support of Microsoft. OpenAI's lawyers countered that there was no evidence of a promise to maintain the lab as a charity, and that the "sour grapes" came only after the value of OpenAI soared and Musk founded xAI. The three-year statute of limitations had also passed, they argued. During jury selection one prospect described Musk as a "greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage"; few had heard of Altman. Musk testified that he was a "fool" to provide the initial $38m of funding to OpenAI, and sparred testily with Altman's lawyer during cross-examination, calling questions "unfair" and "definitionally complex". The judge ordered both men to curb their "propensity to use social media".
Altman says that OpenAI, too, would never get involved in mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry, but insists that its models feature safeguards to prevent such uses, dispensing with any need for further legal guarantees. He signed an OpenAI contract with the Pentagon the same day that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth turned on Anthropic, claiming he rushed into the contract in an attempt to calm things down. He has said that declaring Anthropic a supply-chain risk "is a very bad decision". Hundreds of employees at OpenAI and Google signed a public letter urging leadership to support Anthropic.
Start the day with a smile. After that you can be your nasty old self again.