--- born: 1985-04-22 category: Technologists created: 2026-06-19 location: San Francisco, California summary: Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who led Y Combinator, cofounded and runs OpenAI, launched the iris-scanning identity project Worldcoin, and was briefly fired and reinstated as OpenAI chief executive in the November 2023 board crisis. tags: - Person - SamAltman - OpenAI - YCombinator - ArtificialIntelligence - SiliconValley - Worldcoin updated: 2026-06-19 --- Sam Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor who cofounded and leads [OpenAI](/organizations/openai/), the company at the center of the generative-AI era. A [Stanford University](/organizations/stanford-university/) dropout, he founded the location startup Loopt in the first Y Combinator batch in 2005, ran Y Combinator as president from 2014 to 2019, and cofounded OpenAI with [Elon Musk](/people/elon-musk/) in 2015. His career runs through the same Silicon Valley founder network as [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/), who was a part-time partner at Y Combinator during Altman's presidency.[^1][^2] ### Y Combinator and OpenAI Altman became president of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator, in 2014 and expanded it into research and large-scale funding before leaving in 2019 to focus on OpenAI, where he became chief executive when the organization created its capped-profit structure and took a Microsoft investment. Under Altman, OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022 and became the most prominent AI company in the world.[^2][^3] Altman's first company, Loopt, raised about 30 million dollars and was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation in March 2012 for 43.4 million dollars after failing to gain traction. At Y Combinator he widened the accelerator's reach, launched the YC Research arm in 2015 (which seeded OpenAI), and pushed into late-stage funding. He took no salary as OpenAI chief executive and held no equity in the company, an arrangement he cited as evidence of disinterested motives during the 2023 board fight, though he holds stakes through OpenAI's startup fund and across a wide personal portfolio. In the 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI's for-profit arm into a public-benefit corporation valued at 500 billion dollars, Altman remained chief executive without a founder's equity grant of the kind common at companies of that scale.[^2][^6] ### The 2023 Firing and Reinstatement On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman, saying he had not been "consistently candid"; the directors included [Ilya Sutskever](/people/ilya-sutskever/), Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley, the latter two tied to the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) movement, and the dispute turned on the pace of AI commercialization. After roughly 700 employees threatened to resign and Microsoft offered to hire him, Altman was reinstated within days under a reconstituted board. The episode positioned Altman and the commercial wing against the effective-altruism and AI-safety faction that had grown out of the [Rationalist Community](/concepts/rationalist-community/).[^3][^4] Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella announced on November 20, 2023 that Altman and Greg Brockman would lead a new advanced-research lab inside Microsoft, a threat that gave Microsoft leverage and the staff a destination if the board held firm. The reconstituted board that returned Altman was chaired by Bret Taylor and added Larry Summers, while Sutskever, McCauley, and Toner departed. In May 2024 Toner gave a public account alleging the board learned of ChatGPT's launch from Twitter rather than from Altman and that he had withheld his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund, claims Altman's allies disputed. A later law-firm review commissioned by the new board found the prior board's concerns did not warrant his removal.[^3][^4] ### Worldcoin and Other Ventures In 2019 Altman cofounded Worldcoin (operated by Tools for Humanity), a project that scans people's irises with a device called the Orb to create a global proof-of-personhood identity tied to a cryptocurrency, which drew regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries over its biometric data collection. Altman has also funded longevity, nuclear-fusion, and biotechnology ventures, the same frontier-technology categories favored across the Thiel network.[^5] Worldcoin raised about 115 million dollars from Blockchain Capital in 2023, with Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Crypto and Bain Capital Crypto among earlier backers, and offered users 25 free WLD tokens for an iris scan. Regulators moved against it across multiple jurisdictions: Kenya suspended its operations in August 2023 over data-misuse fears and a court later ordered the deletion of Kenyans' biometric data, and Spain's data-protection authority used emergency GDPR powers in March 2024 to suspend the project for up to three months. Among Altman's other ventures, he was chairman of and an early investor in the nuclear-fission firm Oklo, which he took public in 2024 through his SPAC AltC Acquisition Corp before stepping down as chair in 2025; he led a 500-million-dollar round in the fusion company Helion Energy in 2021; and he supplied the entire 180-million-dollar seed round of the longevity startup Retro Biosciences out of his own money, a stake revealed by MIT Technology Review in March 2023.[^5][^6] [^1]: "Altman and Musk launched OpenAI as a nonprofit 10 years ago. Now they're rivals," *CNBC,* December 11, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/openai-began-decade-ago-as-nonprofit-lab-musk-and-altman-now-rivals.html [^2]: "The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI's bid to save the world," *MIT Technology Review,* February 17, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ [^3]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained [^4]: "What the chaos at OpenAI says about the future of the industry," *Columbia Journalism Review,* 2023. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/openai_sam_altman_ouster.php [^5]: "Worldcoin and Tools for Humanity," on the iris-scanning identity project and its regulatory scrutiny; contemporaneous press coverage, 2023 onward; "Kenya suspends Worldcoin scans over security, privacy and financial concerns," *TechCrunch,* August 2, 2023, and "Worldcoin hit with temporary ban in Spain over privacy concerns," *TechCrunch,* March 6, 2024. [^6]: "Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death," *MIT Technology Review,* March 8, 2023; "Sam Altman takes nuclear startup Oklo public to power AI ambitions," *CNBC,* May 10, 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altman-investment-180-million-retro-biosciences-longevity-death/