Sam Altman, whose full name is Samuel Harris Altman, was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, into a Jewish family. He is the eldest of four siblings and has a brother named Jack Altman. His father worked as a real estate agent, and his mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist. Altman grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his first computer at the age of eight, an experience that strongly influenced his future path. He graduated from John Burroughs School and later enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied computer science. After one year of study, he dropped out in 2005 without completing his degree.

In 2005, at the age of 19, Sam Altman co-founded a location-based mobile social networking application called Loopt. The service allowed smartphone users to selectively share their locations with others. As CEO of Loopt, Altman raised more than $30 million in investment funding. However, Loopt failed to attract a sufficiently large user base and was ultimately acquired in 2012 by Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million.

In 2011, Sam Altman became a partner at Y Combinator, initially working there part-time. In February 2014, following a decision by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, Altman was appointed president of the organization. In a 2014 blog post, he stated that the combined valuation of Y Combinator-backed companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits, and Stripe exceeded $65 billion. In September 2016, he announced that his responsibilities had expanded as president of YC Group and expressed his goal of growing Y Combinator to fund 1,000 new startups per year, while increasing diversity and placing greater emphasis on deeply technology-focused companies.

In October 2015, Sam Altman announced YC Continuity, a $700 million equity fund designed to support later-stage companies within the Y Combinator ecosystem. One week earlier, he had also announced Y Combinator Research, a non-profit research laboratory, to which he personally donated $10 million. YC Research has conducted studies on topics including universal basic income, the future of computing, education, and the development of new cities.

On December 11, 2015, Sam Altman co-founded the artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI, a non-profit entity, alongside several technology leaders including Elon Musk. OpenAI was initially funded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. Serving as CEO of OpenAI, Altman left Y Combinator in 2020 to focus on OpenAI full-time.

As CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman has been part of the team that developed ChatGPT, a dialogue-focused artificial intelligence chatbot that gained worldwide recognition.

Sam Altman actively invests in technology startups as well as nuclear energy companies. His investment portfolio includes Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, Pinterest, Teespring, Shoptiques, Instacart, Optimizely, Verbling, Soylent, and Retro Biosciences. He is also the chairman of the board of two nuclear energy companies, Helion and Oklo.

Following the success of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, Sam Altman embarked on a world tour in May 2023, visiting 22 countries. During this tour, he met with numerous global leaders and diplomats, including UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, and Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog. He also posed for a photograph with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

On November 17, 2023, Sam Altman made headlines when he was dismissed from OpenAI by the company’s board of directors. However, following a strong backlash and protest from OpenAI employees, he was reinstated just a few days later.

In 2014, after the resignation of Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, Sam Altman served as interim CEO of Reddit for a brief period of eight days.

In 2023, Sam Altman was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine. He was previously selected by Forbes in 2015 as the top investor under the age of 30. According to Forbes, his net worth was estimated at $1.1 billion in 2024.

Sam Altman has been a vegetarian since childhood. He is openly gay and was in a nine-year relationship with Loopt co-founder Nick Sivo, which ended shortly after Loopt was acquired in 2012. As of 2023, his partner is an Australian software engineer, Oliver Mulherin. Altman lives in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco and also owns a home in Napa, California.

In January 2024, Sam Altman married Oliver Louis Mulherin in a same-sex marriage.

Source: Biyografiler.com