Sam Altman Age, Boyfriend, Husband, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sam Altman

• Sam Altman spent the majority of his childhood and adulthood in St. Louis, Missouri. He was raised in a middle-class Jewish family.
  

  A childhood photo of Sam Altman

• His interest in coding and computers increased drastically at the age of eight when he received his first PC, an Apple Macintosh. According to sources, Altman began repairing appliances in his house at the age of three.
  

  Sam Altman’s first computer photo

• He likes meditating and does it frequently.

• Sam Altman follows the teachings of Lord Buddha.

• At the age of 12, he started selling baseball cards on the internet. This was his first business model.

• He used to take a lot of interest in mathematics as his family used to play games like square root and 20 Questions during dinner.

• When he was in high school, Sam revealed that he was gay. This revelation shocked his mother a lot who initially found it difficult to accept it but later did. He claimed in an interview that having a computer with internet access helped him a lot in coming out to his parents. He talked about it and said,
  

  Growing up gay in the Midwest in the 2000s was not the most awesome thing. And finding AOL chatrooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you are 11 or 12.”

  

  Sam Altman as a child with his siblings

• Thereafter, he started organising pro-LGBTQ rallies in his school. According to him, his classmates had negative feelings towards people from the community, which led Sam to frequently engage in arguments with them.

• At the age of 17, he obtained a commercial flying license. He used to rent planes and fly over California.

• He founded Loopt, a California-based location-based social networking mobile application, at the age of 19. He started the company with his ex-boyfriend Nick Sivo.
  

  A photo of Sam Altman taken while he was working in Loopt

• In 1998, Sam founded Altman Technologies, Inc. and provided services to the wire and cable industry.

• In 2004, he applied for a Summer Founders Program (SFP) and managed to secure $6000 funding for Loopt.

• Thereafter, Sam Altman went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked with other budding entrepreneurs. He spent a lot of time working due to which he did not get time to work out and hence developed scurvy.

• He then presented his idea to business investors and managed to secure $5 million from Sequoia Capital.

• In 2009, he was listed as the five most interesting start-up founders of the last 30 years.

• He was appointed as the president of a startup funding organisation called Y Combinator in 2011; he remained in the post till 2014.

• Despite receiving constant investment, the company, Loopt, failed to attract customers as a result of which Sam had to sell his company for $43.4 million to Green Dot in 2012.

• He and his brother, Jack Altman, then went on to co-found Hydrazine Capital in April of the same year.

• After this, he approached Peter Thiel for an investment in his new organisation Hydrazine Capital. Following this, Sam went on a year-long vacation during which he read philosophical books, played video games, and meditated. He talked about his experience in an interview and said,
  

  I was like, I’m gonna go to an ashram for a while, and it changed my life. I’m sure I’m still anxious and stressed in a lot of ways, but my perception of it is that I feel very relaxed and happy and calm.”

• Hydrazine Capital invested mainly in healthcare, speciality food, and internet-connected hardware.

• As Sam Altman earned money, he started spending lavishly. He reportedly purchased a mansion in Big Sur, California, in which he kept a lot of guns. He also had many artefacts made of gold and owned a couple of McLarens.

• In 2014, Sam served as the CEO of Reddit after its previous CEO stepped down. He remained in the post for eight days. He was replaced by Steve Huffman following which he stepped down as a permanent member of the board, a post which he held till 2022.

• In the same year, he was one of the contributors to the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

• Thereafter, he penned a blog in which he claimed that the total valuation of Y Combinator companies had exceeded $65 billion and had invested in well-known firms such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Zenefits, and Stripe.

• In October 2015, Altman established a unit of Y Combinator named YC Continuity. It was valued at $700 million and majorly invested in the maturing Y Combinator companies.

• Soon after, he invested $10 million in a non-profit research lab named Y Combinator Research.

• In December 2015, he teamed up with Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba and co-founded OpenAI, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research organization, in San Francisco, California, with a capital of $1 billion.
  

  A photo of Elon Musk and Sam Altman taken while they both served in OpenAI

• Later, he was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the venture capital category.

• In August 2016, the graphic card manufacturing company Nvidia presented its first supercomputer, DGX-1, to OpenAI. This assisted the organisation to complete its research module rendering in two days instead of six days.
  

  Sam Altman with the CEO of Nvidia posing for a photo with the supercomputer Nvidia Corporation gifted to OpenAI

• By December 2016, many video game developers signed a deal with OpenAI to render its resources in creating games.

• According to a 2017 report, the organisation spent $7.9 million on creating an indigenous cloud computing system.

• In the same year, he was seen in the documentary Secrets of Silicon Valley.
  

  A poster of the Secrets of Silicon Valley

• The next year, Sam and Elon Musk fell apart due to which the latter resigned from the company.

• According to Altman, Elon Musk thought that OpenAI had “fallen behind” its competitors in the market in the context of technology and resourcefulness. However, Elon later clarified that he resigned as he wished to focus more on Tesla, which was developing AI for its cars.

• In 2018, he decided to contest gubernatorial (governor) elections in the state of California. He, however, later decided against it and withdrew his nomination. He had decided to run for the election as he was sceptical of the way in which President Donald Trump was driving policies in the US.

• Matt Krisiloff, an associate of Sam Altman, claimed in an interview that Sam spent six months organizing focus groups in California. Altman later released a 10-point plan that aimed to lower housing costs, provide Medicare for all, implement tax reform, and set clean-energy targets.

• He used to be against President Trump for which he used to get a lot of support from pro-Democratic Party supporters. However, he once received criticism after he refused to back out of a deal with Peter Thiel, who supported Trump’s policies on Mexican, Asian, and Muslim immigrants.

• In the same year, he worked on a politically motivated project, the United Slate, with the intent to improve housing and healthcare functionality in the US.

• In 2019, Altman managed to raise a billion dollars for OpenAI.

• In the same year, he created a human-like artificial intelligence Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2). Initially, the AI was restricted and its source coding was kept a secret. The tool received certain criticism from the users as it often generated offensive and racist responses.

• Later, in the same year, the company converted into a “capped” for-profit from a non-profit company.

• The company later got incorporated and was renamed OpenAI Global, LLC to legally attract investment from venture funds and, in addition, to grant employees stakes in the company.

• He established another company Tools For Humanity in 2019. As of 2024, the company has been banned from France, the United Kingdom, Bavaria, South Korea, Kenya, Spain, Portugal, and Hong Kong due to privacy concerns.

• In March of the same year, Altman became Chairman of the Board at Y Combinator to concentrate on OpenAI. However, according to reports, Altman allegedly left Y Combinator as he was fired for self-appointing himself as Chairman without proper authorization.

• In 2020, Sam Altman signed a deal with Microsoft following which he gained access to the Azure-based supercomputing platform for coding.
  

  Sam Altman posing for a photo with the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella

• In February of the same year, Sam decided to allow his organisation to commercially license its technologies.

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sam used to wear an Israeli military gas mask. To avoid getting infected with the virus, he purchased a ranch at a secluded place in Napa, California.

• It was during this time that Sam Altman worked with several medical institutions by providing them with funds to increase the per-day COVID sampling capabilities. He undertook the funding under Project Covalence.

• He played a crucial role in raising funds at his home in San Francisco for 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and fellow tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
  

  Andrew Yang and Sam Altman in a conversation

• In May 2020, Altman contributed $250,000 to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that supported Joe Biden, the then-Democratic presidential candidate.

• Thereafter, OpenAI launched Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), with its sub-class AI, GPT-3.5, being released in 2022.

• In January 2021, OpenAI suffered a setback when 11 senior engineers left the organisation and started their AI company Anthropic PBC.

• In March 2021, Altman penned a technical article titled Moore’s Law for Everything.

• In the same month, Sam and Michael Klein founded a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) named AltC Acquisition Corp. He was later appointed as the CEO of the company.

• In 2022, OpenAI released DALL-E, a text-to-image model developed using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions known as prompts.

• In December 2022, Sam Altman worked on releasing the ChatGPT on which within five days 5 million people logged in.

• While in 2023, ChatGPT received an income of $200 million, in 2024, it received an income of approximately $1 billion.

• In 2023, Microsoft and OpenAI renewed their 2020 deal according to which Microsoft would invest $10 billion in the following years only on the condition that ChatGPT uses their Azure-based supercomputing.

• As per sources, the deal also included a secret pact according to which Microsoft would keep more than 70 per cent of the revenue earned and 49 per cent of stakes of OpenAI until they cover their Return on Investment (ROI). It was believed that Microsoft acquired the stakes to incorporate ChatGPT’s features in Bing, its search engine.

• In 2023, Microsoft signed another deal with Sam Altman according to which the company’s AI tool was incorporated into Microsoft Edge and Microsoft 365.

• In the same year, the company received another setback when Reid Garrett Hoffman, the founding investor and member of the board of OpenAI, quit to invest in his AI company Inflection AI.

• In May of the same year, Sam and several other AI founders gave their recommendation for forming an organisation that would function as per the norms of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and monitor artificial intelligence.

• In July, Sam worked on releasing a super alignment project with the objective of aligning future superintelligences by automating alignment research using AI.

• Thereafter, the company acquired Global Illumination, an AI company in New York.

• In 2023, Sam undertook a 22-country, 25-city world tour with the intent of meeting with ChatGPT users to gather their opinions and suggestions for the betterment of the tool.

• In the same year, he called for laws to help regulate the use and development of AI.

• Later, he went to European nations such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, where he met their heads to increase cooperation between the governments and OpenAI.
  

  Sam Altman with the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a conversation

• Sam Altman and Peng Xiao later signed a deal which allowed Xiao’s Group 42 Holding Ltd, a leading Asian AI development company, to use OpenAI’s resources including GPT-4.

• Sam was removed from his post as the CEO of OpenAI in November 2023. According to sources, the decision was taken to do so after board members expressed their dissatisfaction with Sam on his “ways of handling situations.”

• He was later reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI. Reportedly, the board of directors were forced to reinstate him after being pressured by employees and investors who threatened to withdraw their support from the organisation if their demands were not met.
  

  A photo of Sam Altman taken while he was attending an event organised by OpenAI

• In January 2024, Sam signed a deal with Arizona State University that allowed the university to utilize all the features of OpenAI. This marked Sam’s first agreement with any educational institution.

• Thereafter, Sam’s organisation released Sora, a text-to-video model. This was considered as a breakthrough in the AI technology.

• In May 2024, the company received another setback after its chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned. With this many other rank holders of OpenAI also quit their jobs to join Ilya. This caused the organisation to shut down its super alignment project.

• In the same month, Sam’s AltC Acquisition Corp signed a deal with Oklo Inc. following which Oklo was merged with AltC.

• Soon after, Sam brokered a deal with the founder of the social media site, Reddit. According to the deal, Sam was allowed to access the Application Programming Interface (API).

• Later, Sam entered into a deal with News Corp, which allowed OpenAI to integrate news from popular news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times, and The Sunday Times into its AI training platform. However, The New York Times did not agree to the deal and filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using its content to train its AI platforms.

• In June 2024, several former employees filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing it of prioritizing profits over safety and ethical use of its AI tools. The employees also called for formulating a Congress committee for drafting regulations for using and further progressing the development of AI.

• The company made a breakthrough when it signed a deal with Apple in the same year to provide its services to its appliances.

• Thereafter, it was claimed that OpenAI, under Sam’s guidance, was working on developing an AI capable of accessing the sources on the internet by itself for enhanced reasoning under Project Strawberry. The project was finalised as o1 and the final version was released in September 2024.

• Another setback for the organisation came in August 2024 when John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, left his post and joined Anthropic PBC.

• Soon after, the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati resigned from the post. According to sources, she left the organisation after falling out of favour with Sam Altman about whom she had raised concerns in front of the Board of Directors.

• By October 2024, the company’s value had risen over $157 billion. It increased more when over $6.6 billion was raised in investiture for the company.

• In the same month, Sam managed to broker a deal between Microsoft, which used OpenAI’s intelligence tool, and the United States Department of Defence (DOD) as the latter considered AI to be an important tool in the conduction of the operations of the US military in Africa.

• He announced in January 2025 that OpenAI would launch its Stargate Project in collaboration with MNCs like Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX. Later, the US government was also involved in the project. It is estimated that Sam Altman’s company would invest $500 billion into the project.

• Sam and Elon have often spoken against the utilisation and advancement of AI tools. While Sam considers it to be a part of the modern “intelligence explosion,” Elon thinks of it as a danger to “humanity’s existence.”

• A close relative of Altman once revealed that after his father passed away, Sam allotted only five minutes to each of his siblings to speak in his memory. This decision of his was not liked by the others.

• Other than investing in AI-related companies across the world, Sam Altman has also invested in several nuclear-fusion-generating companies.

• He has a keen interest in cryptocurrencies and has developed Worldcoin, a system where a cryptocurrency can only be accessed by its holder after a matching retina scan. He also managed to raise $115 million for the project. He later renamed the project to World.
  

  Sam Altman attending an event being organised by World

• Sam idolizes the American nuclear physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. They both share the same date of birth.

• Even though he is considered to be a pioneer in the field of AI, Sam has often expressed his fears of AI “getting out of hand and ultimately harming the world.”

• He has served as the chairman of the board of directors of Helion Energy and Oklo Inc.

• In 2024, he was named for the first time in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

• In November of the same year, the mayor of San Francisco made him a member of his transition team.

• His political inclination shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans in the 2024 US Presidential elections. He reportedly donated $1 million to the Inaugural Fund for President Donald Trump.

• As of January 2025, Sam has invested over $2.8 billion in over 400 AI and other technology companies.

• In February 2025, Altman visited India, where he met with several prominent businessmen and praised the country’s progress in AI development as “remarkable.” This marked a significant change in his stance, as he had previously referred to India’s advancements in the field as “hopeless” in 2023.
  

  Sam Altman with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to India

• In the initial days of his entrepreneurial years, Sam Altman used to work over 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• His organisation, OpenAI, has assisted in the creation of the popular game Defense of the Ancients (DotA) 2.

• Sam Altman believes that at some point in the future, an apocalypse will happen as a result of which he has acquired and stored guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks. He spoke of it, in an interview, and said,
  

  I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

• He has often voiced his opinion in favour of implementing laws and acts such as land value taxation and universal basic income (UBI) in the US.

• He has given talks at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

• Sam Altman has been a guest on podcasts such as Invest Like the Best, The Knowledge Project, The a16z podcast, and Masters of Scale.
  

  Sam Altman’s picture taken during a podcast

• He is an angel investor for Pinterest, an American social media service for publishing and discovering information in the form of pinboards.

• He has also invested in Humane, the world’s first wearable computer powered by AI, and Retro Biosciences, a research company whose aim is to extend human life by ten years.

• In an interview, Sam Altman revealed that he has planned on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI – human-like intelligence software that can self-teach), which is aimed at making society a better place to live in.

• Sam once sued the builder of his Russian Hill estate, claiming that the construction was substandard. He was particularly dissatisfied with the way in which the estate’s “Batcave” was constructed.

• According to sources, Sam Altman always carries a blue coloured bag which contains code and a special device to shut down OpenAI in case AI takes control of itself and becomes threatening to mankind.
  

  Sam Altman with his blue colour bag which he always carries with himself

• Sam has been a vegetarian since his childhood. He avoids eating sweets, junk food, and spicy food to stay in shape.

• Despite owning an impressive fleet of luxurious cars, Sam Altman likes to ride in an Uber as driving his cars would cost him a lot more than taking a cab.

• Sam once revealed that he and Oliver were expecting to adopt and welcome a child into their Hawaii mansion. He also said that the child would be taught all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) so that he could “keep up with the pace of the future world.” He said,
  

  My kid is never gonna grow up being smarter than AI. We always find new jobs, even though every time we stare at a new technology, we assume they’re all going to go away.”

• Sam loves to listen to music that has no wording but just tunes. He likes listening to such songs especially while working.

• Other than working in the field of AI, Sam also wants to start an airline of his own. He has also been involved in the development of a supersonic aircraft with leading American aircraft manufacturers.

• Sam is a car enthusiast, and he and his husband have participated in racing events and drive specialised Formula 1 cars.
  

  A photo of Sam Altman taken inside an F1 car

• He likes to visit beaches and surf on the waves.
  

  A photo of Sam Altman taken while he was surfing

• He likes to consume alcoholic beverages occasionally.
  

  A snip of Sam Altman’s tweet on X