Sam Altman Net Worth 2024: Earning, Income, and Career
Sam Altman is worth $500 million; he is an entrepreneur, coder, investor, and blogger. Sam Altman is well-known for his time as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI, an AI research center, and Y Combinator, an accelerator for computer startups.
Sam Altman’s Net Worth
Altman followed in the footsteps of other tech entrepreneurs who left college to found their own companies: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. His estimated net worth ranges from $500 million to $600 million, and he joined the ranks of Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg in becoming a wealthy man despite never having attended college.
| Name | Sam Altman |
| Profession | CEO of OpenAI |
| Date of Birth | 22 April 1985 |
| Gender | Male |
| Age | 37 years old |
| Height | 170 cm |
| Weight | (143 lbs) 65 kg |
| Net Worth | $500 million |
Who is Sam Altman?
Sam Altman’s birthplace was Chicago, Illinois, USA, on April 22, 1985, and his upbringing was St. Louis, MO. When he was eight years old, his parents, Connie Gibstine, a dermatologist, and Jerry Altman, a real estate broker, gave him his first computer, an Apple Macintosh.
He quickly mastered the art of coding, website development, and software engineering.
Altman went to St. Louis’s exclusive John Burroughs School, which is a college preparatory institution. Soon after, he enrolled in Stanford University’s computer science program. However, he and two other classmates left in 2005 to focus on building the mobile app Loopt, a location-based social networking service.
Career
Among the first group of companies to participate in Y Combinator, Loopt was one of them. Loopt was valued at $175 million after raising $30 million in VC funding.
To Green Dot, a supplier and platform for prepaid debit cards and payments, for $43 million in March 2012, Altman and his co-founders sold the company due to the lack of interest from customers who were willing to disclose their location with others.
After receiving $5 million from Loopt and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Altman and his brother Jack Altman established the venture capital firm Hydrazine Capital, which raised $21 million. Y Combinator startups were funded by Hydrazine.
After becoming a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, founder Paul Graham appointed Altman to the position of president in 2014. Altman oversaw the $50 million Series B funding round for Reddit, a social media site, at Y Combinator.
Among the 30 Under 30 in venture capital investing, Altman was included in 2015 by Forbes at the age of 29. He launched Y Combinator Research, a nonprofit research lab with $10 million in funding, and YC Continuity, an equity fund with $700 million in funding that invests in YC firms as they grow.
This position was expanded to include president of YC Group in September 2016 for Altman.
In the meanwhile, Altman invested $1 billion when he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Infosys, Amazon Web Services, and YC Research. Their official mission statement for the firm read: “strive for digital intelligence advancements that will benefit humanity as a whole.”
Due to OpenAI’s transformation from a non-profit to a dual structure with a “capped profit” firm, Altman stepped down as CEO in March 2019 and became chairman of the Y Combinator board. His involvement with YC Group had waned by 2020.
OpenAI and Altman’s Role
As a result of Altman’s direction, OpenAI became the industry standard for generative AI. Launching ChatGPT in November 2022, the company had already received a $1 billion investment in 2019 from Microsoft.
In just five days, the AI chatbot became the fastest-ever platform to achieve one million users.
The DALL·E text-to-image AI generator, created by OpenAI, was first released in January 2021. Launched in September 2023, the most recent model, DALL·E 3, can comprehend “significantly more nuance and detail” compared to its predecessors.
An undisclosed amount, thought to be approximately $10 billion, was revealed as a “multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI by Microsoft in January 2023.
Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, K2 Global, and Founders Fund were among the venture capital companies that contributed $300 million to the company’s April 2023 funding round, bringing its valuation up to $29 billion. An $86 billion valuation was mentioned in October 2023 during discussions on a possible stock sale.
Altman was included in Time magazine’s 2023 list of the 100 most important people in the world.
“People should be happy that we’re a little bit scared” about generative AI systems, Altman remarked in a March 2023 interview with ABC News. “Some individuals won’t adhere to the same safety protocols that we do,” he stated. “I believe that society has a finite window of opportunity to determine its response, regulation, and handling of that.”
At this point, OpenAI has split into two entities: OpenAI Inc., a nonprofit, and OpenAI Global LLC, a “capped-profit” corporation. With OpenAI Inc. as the only controlling stakeholder, the maximum return on investment in OpenAI Global was 100 times.
Even if Altman does not own any shares in the for-profit enterprise, he is nevertheless bound to the non-profit’s fiduciary duties as an owner and officer.