Sam Altman

Sam Altman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1985 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Stanford University to study computer science before dropping out in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-sharing social network that was later acquired by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million. After Loopt, Altman became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011 and rose to become its president in 2014, a position that gave him visibility into hundreds of startups annually and a network spanning virtually every major venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Altman stepped down from Y Combinator to become OpenAI's CEO full-time in 2019.

Sam Altman co-chaired OpenAI at its 2015 founding and became CEO in 2019. He negotiated the Microsoft partnership, oversaw the ChatGPT launch in 2022, survived the board's brief attempt to remove him in November 2023, and led the October 2025 recapitalization and the $122 billion round that valued OpenAI at $852 billion in March 2026.