Meet Sam Altman, the ex-OpenAI CEO who learned to code at 8 and is a doomsday prepper with a stash of guns and gold

Sam Altman is well known in the startup scene in Silicon Valley, but he's out at OpenAI almost exactly one year after ChatGPT launched.

Courtesy of Sam Altman

• Sam Altman is out as the CEO of OpenAI after 4 years at the helm.
• Before that, he was well known in Silicon Valley as president of startup accelerator Y-Combinator.
• Here's how the serial entrepreneur got his start — and ended up helming one of today's most-watched companies.

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI announced that Altman would be no longer be the company's CEO.

Mira Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 when it was only a nonprofit research lab.

PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images

On Friday, the OpenAI board of directors announced that Altman would be stepping down from his role as CEO and leaving the board "effective immediately."

In a blog post, the board said it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," and added that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications." In the meantime, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati is to step in as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent replacement.

"We are grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," a statement from OpenAI's board says. "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."

Altman issued his own statement via a post on X.

"i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people," Altman wrote.

He added: "will have more to say about what's next later."

The specific details surrounding Altman's ousting have yet to emerge, but here's a look at his life and career up until now.

Sam Altman, 38, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old.

f11photo/Shutterstock

Source: The New Yorker

 

He told The New Yorker that having a Mac helped him with his sexuality. Altman came out to his parents when he was 16.

Matt Weinberger/Business Insider

"Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker. "And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you're eleven or twelve."

Source: The New Yorker

He attended John Burroughs School, a private, non-sectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.

Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock

Altman came out as gay to the whole community after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.

"What Sam did changed the school," his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. "It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world."

Source: The New Yorker

Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before he and two of his classmates dropped out to work full time on their mobile app, Loopt, that shared a user's location with their friends.

turtix/Shutterstock

Source: The New Yorker

Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit.

Getty Images

Source: The New Yorker, The Business of Business

Loopt eventually reached a $175 million valuation, but it didn't garner enough interest, so the founders sold it for $43 million in 2012.

Drew Angerer/Getty

The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.

One of Loopt's cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.

It's unclear what Altman's current net worth is.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, All Things Digital, Y Combinator, The New Yorker

After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million. That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel holding hundred dollar bills while speaking at the Bitcoin 2022 Conference.

Marco Bello/Getty Images

Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies, and led Reddit's Series B fundraising round.

He told The New Yorker, "you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced."

In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the startup accelerator.

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of Y Combinator, speaks to reporters on the first day of the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 11, 2017 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Source: YC, CNN

While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup," in the fall of 2014.

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Source: How to Start a Startup

In 2015, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at age 29.

Sam Altman.

Courtesy of Sam Altman

Source: Forbes

After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch. He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.

Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 8, 2016 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Drew Angerer/Getty

Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said, "Under Sam, the level of YC's ambition has gone up 10x."

Source: The New Yorker

Altman once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. He also said he likes renting planes and flying them all over California.

The McLaren 720S.

McLaren

Source: The New Yorker

Altman told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, "I prep for survival," and warned of either a "lethal synthetic virus," AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.

Drew Angerer/Getty

"I try not to think about it too much," Altman told the founders in 2016. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

Source: The New Yorker

Altman's mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, "Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He'll call and say he has a headache—and he'll have Googled it, so there's some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, that it's just stress."

Getty Images

Source: The New Yorker

Altman has a brother, Jack, who is a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform. Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies.

Julia and Jack Altman walk near their home in the Mission District of San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, July 7, 2019.

San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Contributor

"Moonshot" companies are startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.

Source: Insider

In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX at the time. Their goal for the non-profit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humans.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California.

Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

"We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?" Elon Musk told The New York Times in 2015. "We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity."

Source: Insider, The New York Times

Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI along with Altman and Musk, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Peter Thiel.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman is a financial backer of OpenAI.

Tony Avelar/AP

Source: Insider

After the 2016 election, Altman, who tweeted that he voted against Donald Trump, said he decided to talk to 100 Trump supporters around the US to understand what they did and didn't like about the president. He also wanted to know "what would convince them not to vote for him in the future."

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

Drew Angerer/Getty Image

In a thread on Twitter, Altman said he was "voting against Trump because I believe the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America."

He also said Peter Thiel, who was still working with YC at the time, "is a high profile supporter of Trump," and that, "I disagree with this."

But, he said, "YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee."

YC and Thiel stopped working together a year later in 2017 for unspecified reasons.

During his interviews, Altman said he "did not expect to talk to so many Muslims, Mexicans, Black people, and women in the course of this project."

He said almost everyone he approached was willing to talk to him, but they also didn't want to share their names in fear of being "targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him." Altman said one of the people he talked to in Silicon Valley made him sign a confidentiality agreement before talking because she was scared of losing her job for supporting Trump.

Source: Twitter, Sam Altman, Insider

Altman stepped down as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He stayed in a chairman role at the accelerator.

Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator

@sama

Source: Insider

At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."

Former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk

Getty

Altman said OpenAI had "never made any revenue," and that it had "no current plans to make revenue." 

"We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said at the time.

Source: TechCrunch

Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it turned away from being a nonprofit company into a "capped profit" corporation.

Sam Altman finished a global tour in June to sell AI as a force for good to leaders.

Skye Gould/Business Insider