In This Article
Sam Altman has made global headlines as the founder and CEO of OpenAI, creator of the cryptocurrency Worldcoin, and a major proponent of AI technology. He’s already one of the most influential entrepreneurs of the 21st century, and his impact could prove historic as OpenAI continues to lead the AI race.
In our Sam Altman profile, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Altman—from who he is and his past companies to his leadership of OpenAI and involvement in Worldcoin.
Quick Facts on Sam Altman
- Name: Samuel Harris Gibstine Altman
- Current role: CEO of OpenAI
- Other affiliations: Chairman of Helion Energy, Founder of Hydrazine Capital, Founder of Tools for Humanity
- Age and birthday: April 22, 1985 (40 years old)
- Height: 5’10”
- Education and college background: Stanford University (dropped out after two years)
- Known for: OpenAI leadership, Worldcoin, Y Combinator
- Notable collaborations and projects: Hydrazine Capital, Helion Energy, Oklo, Exowatt, Loopt, Tools for Humanity
- Solana Advocate: He is a vocal supporter of Solana, often highlighting its technology and market potential.
Sam Altman Biography: Summary
Sam Altman is one of the most influential tech leaders and VC investors of the 21st century. His work at OpenAI has pushed AI into the public sphere and ignited a global AI race. He’s also involved with Tools for Humanity, the company behind the World project, and has invested in major companies like Reddit, Stripe, and Helion Energy.
Who Is Sam Altman?
Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur, technologist, and venture capital (VC) investor. He is responsible for founding several companies, including Tools for Humanity (the company behind the cryptocurrency Worldcoin) and Loopt, a location-based social network. He served as president of the VC incubator Y Combinator from 2014-2019. Most notably, Sam Altman was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and has served as the company’s CEO since 2019.
Biography and Early Life
Sam Altman was born Samuel Harris Gibstine Altman on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the eldest of four siblings and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.
Altman’s family was a middle-class Jewish family. His mother worked as a dermatologist, and his father was a real estate broker.
Altman attended the prestigious private John Burroughs School, where he showed an early interest in technology. At age 8, he was given an Apple Macintosh, which Altman says kick-started his interest in programming and technology.
Notably, Altman came out as gay while in high school. He announced his sexuality to his entire class at an assembly in response to other students protesting a speaker for National Coming Out Day. Altman married his now-husband, Oliver Mulherin, in January 2024.
Education and College
After high school at the John Burroughs School, Sam Altman attended Stanford University as a computer science major from 2003 to 2005. However, he dropped out during his sophomore year at age 19 without earning a degree to found the social media app Loopt.
Sam Altman: Career Timeline
Sam Altman has invested in over 400 companies and is one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and successful VC investors. Here’s a quick look at some of his most notable investments and corporate leadership roles.
-
Loopt
Altman’s career began when he left Stanford. He co-founded the location-based social media app Loopt with Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande. Loopt received $5 million in initial funding from VC firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates and launched on Boost Mobile devices in 2006.Loopt went on to raise more than $30 million from investors, but failed to develop a sustained user base. It was sold to Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million in March 2012.
-
Y Combinator
Sam Altman joined startup incubator Y Combinator as a partner in 2011, then took over the company as president in 2014. As a partner in Y Combinator, Altman took part in the company’s venture funds, which added significantly to his wealth.His goal as president of Y Combinator was to expand the incubator to work with 1,000 companies per year. He focused the company on “hard technology” startups, including biotech companies. Some of the tech companies that passed through Y Combinator while Altman was president include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Instacart, and Reddit.
Altman left Y Combinator in 2019 as he began to focus more on his work as CEO of OpenAI. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has stated that Altman was not fired from his role, but rather departed after being asked to choose between Y Combinator and OpenAI.
-
Reddit
Sam Altman was briefly the CEO of social media company Reddit in 2014. He held the position for 8 days between the resignation of CEO Yishan Wong and the appointment of Steve Huffman.Altman was a major investor in Reddit through Y Combinator. Prior to Reddit’s IPO in 2024, Altman was listed as the company’s third-largest shareholder.
-
Helion Energy
Altman has been the chairman of the board of Helion Energy, a startup aimed at building nuclear fusion reactors, since 2015. He initially invested $9.5 million in the company and followed up with a $375 million investment in 2021—his largest known personal investment to date. The company is now valued at $5.4 billion and aims to provide fusion energy to tech giant Microsoft by 2028.
-
Oklo
Altman has also been involved with another energy startup, Oklo. He founded a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2021, which merged with Oklo in 2024. Altman served as chairman of Oklo from May 2024 to April 2025, at which point he stepped down. Part of the reason for his resignation is reportedly that he wants OpenAI to be able to purchase power from Oklo in the future without the appearance of a conflict of interest.
OpenAI
Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 as a nonprofit alongside Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Altman and Musk initially co-chaired the nonprofit board.
OpenAI’s stated purpose was—and remains—to “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.” The nonprofit sought to partner with AI researchers and make its own research publicly available to maximize its benefits.
Altman foresaw OpenAI’s need for a huge amount of funding to chart a path towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), stating in 2019 that the nonprofit planned to spend $1 billion within five years. To raise these funds, Altman led OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a capped for-profit company. This enabled companies and VC firms to invest in OpenAI and enabled the company to grant shares to employees, which was key for attracting top AI researchers. Shortly after, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and gave the company deep access to its Azure cloud computing platform.
OpenAI burst into public view in December 2022 when it launched ChatGPT, the first publicly accessible AI chatbot. The free chatbot acquired more than 1 million users within five days of launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history.
The company continued to upgrade its chatbot with subsequent releases. In 2024, OpenAI launched the Sora video creation model and OpenAI o1, the first publicly available AI reasoning model. In October 2025, OpenAI launched Sora as a standalone app, and it instantly shot to the top of app store rankings.
This massive growth was accompanied by significant investment, including a $10 billion contribution from Microsoft in 2023. As of 2025, OpenAI has raised a total of $57.9 billion, including $40 billion from a Softbank-led funding round in March 2025.
OpenAI CEO Timeline
Altman has led OpenAI since its founding in 2015, although he only became CEO full-time in 2019. Elon Musk, previously Altman’s co-chair, left OpenAI in 2018 to focus on Tesla and avoid a conflict of interest with the electric car company’s AI pursuits.
Altman pushed OpenAI to become a capped for-profit company in 2019 and spearheaded the company’s partnership with Microsoft. However, Altman’s moves also led to controversy within OpenAI, most notably because some employees and many watchdogs felt that transitioning to a for-profit approach violated OpenAI’s nonprofit charter.
This ultimately came to a head in November 2023, when the nonprofit’s board—which still controlled the capped for-profit company—fired Sam Altman as CEO. Over the following days, 738 of OpenAI’s 770 employees threatened to leave the company. Microsoft stepped in to negotiate a settlement while simultaneously offering jobs to all OpenAI employees.
Within a week, the board backed down and reinstated Altman. Several members of the nonprofit board resigned after this episode. Most of OpenAI’s original leadership team and many of the company’s AI safety researchers, who had raised concerns about the release of ChatGPT, left the company in 2024.
After this episode, Altman sought to restructure OpenAI as a traditional for-profit company, casting off the company’s non-profit roots. However, in order to do this, he needed the support of Microsoft, which was OpenAI’s biggest investor. OpenAI and Microsoft ultimately reached a non-binding agreement to allow OpenAI to restructure in 2025.
Since the agreement was reached, OpenAI has established new investment partnerships with chipmakers NVIDIA and AMD. As part of the AMD deal, OpenAI will reportedly take a 10% stake in the chipmaker.
Worldcoin
Around the same time that Altman moved into his CEO role full-time at OpenAI in 2019, he co-founded another company, Tools for Humanity, with Alex Blania. Altman served as the chair of the company’s board and continues in that role today.
Tools for Humanity is best known for the World project, a blockchain-based biometric identity verification system. It uses a retina-scanning device known as the Orb to create biometric profiles of individuals. World incentivizes individuals worldwide to use its technology by paying them Worldcoin tokens (WLD), a cryptocurrency created on top of the Optimism blockchain that can be used for digital goods and services on the World app.
Worldcoin’s goal is to create a unique ID for every person on Earth. Altman has said he sees this as an essential step to prove humanity in the age of AI. Worldcoin aims to build a global identity and financial network, centered on its Proof-of-Personhood system, which verifies individuals by scanning their irises through a device called the Orb.
However, the company has run into significant controversy because of its data-gathering and privacy practices. Regulators in several countries, including Spain, Portugal, Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Kenya, have ordered Worldcoin to stop collecting data or delete existing data. Critics have also expressed concern that the Company’s system of paying people who create IDs in WLD tokens unfairly targets poor populations.
To date, World has created digital IDs for 16 million people worldwide. The WLD token has a market cap of more than $2.6 billion.
Collaboration With Jony Ive
Altman made headlines again in May 2025 with an announcement that OpenAI would be buying Jony Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom. Ive is known for being the creative genius behind many of Apple’s products, including the iPhone, and was deeply trusted by Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs.
According to the letter from Sam & Jony published by OpenAI, the two companies began collaborating in 2023. The goal behind the collaboration is to create consumer devices that embed OpenAI’s technology, including chatbots and generative AI tools like Sora.
So far, there’s been little news about what type of device OpenAI and Ive might be building. Ive has said he wants to redefine individuals’ relationships with their smartphones. Most recently, OpenAI announced that the rollout of any device could be delayed due to unspecified technical issues.
Depending on the source, Sam Altman’s net worth ranges between $1.8 billion and $2.3 billion. Fortune lists it at $1.9 billion, while Forbes pegs it at $2.3 billion at the time of writing. The majority of Altman’s wealth comes from tech investments unrelated to OpenAI. While at Y Combinator, Altman invested in a variety of companies, including Reddit, Airbnb, Uber, Instacart, Asana, DoorDash, Stripe, and Helion Energy. Altman runs multiple small investment firms with his brothers, including Hydrazine Capital and Apollo Projects. Much of the capital used to finance these investments came from Altman’s exit from Loopt in 2012. Notably, Altman has no direct investment in OpenAI. He has a small, indirect stake in the company through a Y Combinator fund. Much of Altman’s personal wealth is illiquid, tied up in private companies and startups. For example, he has invested nearly $400 million in Helion Energy—roughly 20% of his estimated worth—which remains inaccessible until the company goes public or is acquired. Similarly, Altman has invested $180 million in biotech company Retro Biosciences, which has not yet gone public. Sam Altman is 40 years old in 2025. He’s 5’10” tall. Altman has a reserved private life and is best known as a Silicon Valley operator who spends most of his time in professional settings. That said, he has been public about some details of his life, including that he has been a vegetarian since he was a teenager, fasts for 15 hours a day, and works out with weights several times per week. Altman is known to be a fan of sports cars and owns farms in Hawaii and California, where he spends time decompressing from the tech world. Altman has been mostly quiet on politics, but said in 2025 that he felt “politically homeless” and alienated from the Democratic Party. He and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, have signed the Giving Pledge, indicating their intent to give away most of their wealth through donations to causes they support. Sam Altman has not taken a public IQ test, so all estimates of his IQ are based on his work and writings. Most sources place his IQ at 150-170, which would qualify him as a “genius” based on IQ alone. However, IQ likely isn’t the best way to measure Altman’s impact or potential. Rather, it makes more sense to look at his track record of investments—many of which have helped launch world-changing companies—and his current tenure at OpenAI. Sam Altman is known to be a fan of luxury sports cars, and he has a collection of several highly valuable cars. Among these are reported to be a first-generation Tesla Roadster, a McLaren F1, and a Lexus LFA. He also owns a Koenigsegg Regera that’s reported to be worth nearly $2 million. Altman has been known to drive F1 racecars on closed tracks as a fun activity outside work. Altman and his husband own at least six properties. These include:Net Worth and 2026 Outlook
Age, Height, and Personal Details
Sam Altman’s IQ
Cars, Homes, and Lifestyle
It’s possible that Altman owns additional properties that are not publicly known. Several of his properties were purchased through LLCs rather than by Altman directly.
Conclusion
Sam Altman has built a record of bold innovation through companies like Loopt, Y Combinator, OpenAI, Helion Energy, and Worldcoin. His work shows a clear focus on advancing technology that reshapes how people live and work. By combining entrepreneurship, investment, and vision, Altman has positioned himself as one of the most influential figures in modern tech, with decisions that continue to guide the future of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
Read our sections on OpenAI and what is Worldcoin for more details about Altman’s involvement with these companies. For details about Altman’s age, height, education, and more, check out our FAQs.
See Also:
- Who is Raoul Pal? Net Worth, Crypto Holdings, and More
- Who is Nic Carter? Analyst Turned Bitcoin Activist
- Who is ZachXBT? Scams Exposed and Crypto Holdings
- Who Is Andrew Tate? Net Worth, Crypto & Controversies
FAQs
Who is Sam Altman?
Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Sora. He’s also the co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company behind the eye-scanning crypto project World. Altman has been a major venture capital investor in Silicon Valley for many years and has invested in companies such as DoorDash, Reddit, and Stripe.
How old is Sam Altman?
Sam Altman was born on April 22, 1985. He is now 40 years old.
What is Sam Altman’s net worth?
Sam Altman’s net worth is estimated at $1.8 to $2.3 billion as of 2026. Much of his net worth is locked up in equity in private companies such as Helion Energy and Retro Biosciences.
Sam Altman net worth 2025?
Sam Altman has a net worth that’s estimated to be between $1.8 and $2.3 billion in 2025.
What is Sam Altman’s height?
Sam Altman is 5 feet 10 inches tall.
What is Sam Altman’s education?
Sam Altman graduated from the high school John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. He attended Stanford for two years, but dropped out in his sophomore year to found the social media company Loopt. Altman has not gone back to earn his bachelor’s degree.
Is Sam Altman the OpenAI CEO?
Yes, Sam Altman has been CEO of OpenAI since the nonprofit was founded in 2015. He began working full-time on OpenAI in 2019 after leaving Y Combinator. Altman was briefly removed as CEO of OpenAI in 2023 by the nonprofit board, but he was reinstated in less than a week after many of the company’s employees threatened to quit.
What is Sam Altman’s role at OpenAI?
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI and the public face of the company. He has been with OpenAI since co-founding it in 2015. Altman is widely seen as the driving force behind OpenAI and has been pushing it to release AI tools to the public.
What is Worldcoin and Sam Altman’s involvement?
Worldcoin, now known as World, is a biometric identification project co-founded by Sam Altman in 2019. The project’s goal is to create biometric IDs for everyone on the planet. World is known for paying users who agree to retina scans with $WLD crypto tokens. Altman remains involved with the project as the chairman of World’s board.
Did Sam Altman collaborate with Jony Ive?
Sam Altman and Jony Ive, the renowned Apple designer, began collaborating in 2023 to help OpenAI build physical AI-enabled devices. OpenAI purchased Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom, in 2025 and Ive is continuing to work with Altman to design devices.
Where can I find a Sam Altman photo?
You can find a photo of Sam Altman on OpenAI’s website or from most major news outlets. Altman doesn’t share a photo of himself on his blog or X account.
Does Sam Altman have a public wiki page?
There is a Wikipedia page dedicated to Sam Altman, although this is written by people other than Altman himself. Altman has his own blog where he shares updates about his work at OpenAI.
What cars does Sam Altman own?
Sam Altman has a collection of luxury sportscars including a first-generation Tesla Roadster, a McLaren F1, a Lexus LFA, and a Koenigsegg Regera.
References
- Sam Altman’s personal blog (Sam Altman Blog)
- Sam Altman’s X account (Sam Altman X)
- Sam Altman’s Wikipedia page (Sam Altman Wikipedia)
- OpenAI news portal (OpenAI)
- Tools for Humanity announcements (Tools For Humanity)
- How Silicon Valley’s Wunderkind Came Out in a Midwest High School (Mostly Human Media)
- Inside Reddit’s Long, Complicated Relationship With OpenAI’s Sam Altman (Inc)
- OpenAI Charter (OpenAI)
- A timeline of Sam Altman’s firing and dramatic return to OpenAI (Reuters)
- Microsoft, OpenAI reach non-binding deal to allow OpenAI to restructure (Reuters)
- OpenAI’s massive AMD deal: Welcome to AI’s mega-blob era (Axios)
Why you can trust 99Bitcoins
Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.
Weekly Research
100k+Monthly readers
Expert contributors
2000+Crypto Projects Reviewed
