OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Has a Billion-Greenback Internet Price. This is How He Acquired There

Sam Altman is a billionaire—although maybe not for the rationale you suppose.

He’s, in truth, the CEO of OpenAI, which is among the many firms main the $500 billion Stargate initiative centered on increasing synthetic intelligence infrastructure within the U.S. However he would not personal direct fairness in that firm, with most of his wealth as a substitute coming from different investments.

Altman has an estimated web price of $1.2 billion, in keeping with Forbes. This is how Altman made his cash.

Tech Investments

Altman is one in all Reddit‘s largest shareholders, and he served on the corporate’s board till 2022. Altman had an 8.7% stake in Reddit, in keeping with an SEC submitting in February 2024 earlier than Reddit’s preliminary public providing (IPO) that March. Reddit had a market capitalization of $35.9 billion as of late January.

Altman’s different investments embrace Airbnb, Uber, Instacart, Asana, and DoorDash, in keeping with The Motley Idiot.

He’s additionally invested within the fintech firm Stripe and nuclear fusion firm Helion, in keeping with Forbes. Stripe was valued at $70 billion in a November tender provide in November, in keeping with Bloomberg.

OpenAI

OpenAI developed the favored AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Altman has been the top of the corporate since 2019; he was briefly fired by OpenAI’s board in November 2023 and rehired per week later.

Altman doesn’t personal direct fairness in OpenAI. As an alternative, he has an oblique curiosity in OpenAI by way of a small funding made earlier than he was full-time by a fund within the startup accelerator firm Y Combinator. Earlier than becoming a member of OpenAI full-time, Altman was a associate at Y Combinator and was the corporate’s president from 2014 to 2019.

Earlier than he grew to become the CEO, Altman was the co-chair of OpenAI when it was based in 2015, together with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Whereas OpenAI initially began as a nonprofit analysis firm with a give attention to utilizing AI “in the way in which that’s most definitely to profit humanity as a complete,” OpenAI launched a “capped” for-profit portion of the corporate managed by the nonprofit’s board of administrators in 2019.

ChatGPT was projected to herald an estimated $2.7 billion in income for OpenAI for 2024, in keeping with reporting final 12 months by The New York Instances. In October 2024, OpenAI was valued at an estimated $157 billion in a funding spherical by which it raised $6.6 billion.