OpenAI
Leadership History
5 leaders · 2015 to present
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, in the role since 2019. The first chief executive was Mira Murati, from 2018.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fidji Simo | CEO of Applications (former) | 2025 | 2026 | 1 |
| Emmett Shear | Chief Executive Officer | 2023 | 2023 | < 1 |
| Sam Altman | Chief Executive Officer | 2019 | Present | 7 |
| Mira Murati | Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO (former) | 2018 | 2024 | 6 |
| Greg Brockman | President and Co-founder | 2015 | Present | 11 |
OpenAI is the company that made generative AI a mass-market product. Its ChatGPT assistant launched on November 30, 2022 and became the fastest consumer app to reach 100 million users. Today OpenAI builds frontier models (the GPT series and reasoning models), consumer and workplace products (ChatGPT, Codex, Sora) and an API platform used by millions of developers. Its stated mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. OpenAI was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco, California, by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman as an open-source non-profit research institute, before restructuring in 2019 to create the premier frontier artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the o1 reasoning series.
CEO of Applications (former)
2025 – 2026
1 year
Simo was appointed to the board to bring deep consumer product scaling experience from her time as CEO of Instacart and head of the Facebook App.
She provides critical governance and strategic guidance as OpenAI attempts to pivot into consumer hardware and highly monetized SaaS products.
Chief Executive Officer
2023 – 2023
0 years
Emmett Shear served as chief executive of OpenAI from 2023 to 2023.
Chief Executive Officer
2019 – Present
7 years (current)
Led the 2019 Microsoft partnership, the ChatGPT launch, the October 2025 recapitalization and the record 2026 fundraising.
Co-founder and CEO who turned OpenAI from a research lab into a consumer and enterprise platform; briefly removed by the board in November 2023 and reinstated days later.
Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO (former)
2018 – 2024
6 years
Murati managed the rapid, highly disruptive public rollout of ChatGPT and DALL-E, moving the company from closed research to aggressive product deployment.
As CTO, she was the public face of the engineering organization during the chaotic November 2023 board crisis before eventually departing the company in late 2024.
President and Co-founder
2015 – Present
11 years (current)
Brockman managed the transition from a non-profit to a capped-profit structure, enabling the massive $1 billion initial investment from Microsoft.
As President, he directly oversaw the engineering teams responsible for training GPT-4, establishing OpenAI's undisputed early dominance in the LLM market.
These officers report to the chief executive and are not part of the CEO timeline above.
OpenAI's main challenges are compute cost, competition and governance. Training and serving frontier models requires multi-year data center commitments far larger than current revenue, so the company still burns cash. Anthropic, Google Gemini, Meta and xAI compete for the same enterprise and consumer budgets, and open-weight models pressure API pricing. It also faces copyright lawsuits from publishers, Elon Musk's litigation over its for-profit shift, regulatory scrutiny, and a run of senior executive departures in 2026.
Sam Altman is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpenAI. After studying computer science at Stanford University, Altman founded location-based social app Loopt in 2005 (part of Y Combinator's inaugural batch), sold Loopt for $43 million in 2012, and served as President of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, mentoring and investing in tech giants including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and Reddit.
On November 17, 2023, the non-profit board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman over communication disagreements; the decision sparked an immediate international firestorm, during which Microsoft offered to hire Altman, and over 700 of OpenAI's 770 employees signed an open letter threatening to resign unless Altman was reinstated; five days later, Altman was triumphantly reinstated as CEO, and the old board was replaced.
Bret Taylor serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of OpenAI. A renowned Silicon Valley technologist, Taylor was the co-creator of Google Maps, former CTO of Facebook, former co-CEO of Salesforce, and former Chairman of Twitter, appointed in November 2023 to lead OpenAI's restructured corporate governance.
OpenAI's reconstituted board includes distinguished global leaders: Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers (former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard President), Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora), Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann (former CEO of the Gates Foundation), Nicole Seligman, Fidji Simo (CEO of Instacart), and Paul Nakasone (retired US Army General and former Director of the NSA).
Sarah Friar serves as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of OpenAI, having previously served as CEO of Nextdoor and CFO of Square; Friar oversees global financial strategy, capital allocation, the $6.6B fundraising round, and scaling enterprise financial operations.
Kevin Weil serves as Chief Product Officer (CPO) of OpenAI, having previously served as Head of Product at Twitter and Instagram and VP of Product at Planet Labs, leading the commercial productization of ChatGPT, Search, and developer platforms.
Altman believes that AGI will drastically lower the cost of cognitive labor, cure devastating diseases, transform clean energy fusion, and generate abundance, advocating for universal basic income (UBI) and sovereign wealth funds to ensure technological wealth is shared universally.
Sam Altman was named TIME's CEO of the Year in 2023, featured on the TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people, and has testified before the US Congress, advising world leaders across Washington, London, Tokyo, and Paris on AI governance.
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