To amass his fortune, the young entrepreneur played on all fronts. The boss of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI, Sam Altman, is a billionaire in dollars, according to Forbes magazine, a fortune he owes to investments other than OpenAI, of which he claims to hold no go.
The 38-year-old entrepreneur owes his first millions to the resale, in 2012, of the Loopt social network, based on geolocation sharing, a young company he co-founded in 2005, at the age of 19. Today, his assets come in particular from stakes in the social network Reddit, of which the funds he created control nearly 8%, for a total valuation of nearly $600 million.
Sam Altman, however, only owns a fraction of this stake, for a valuation of less than 100 million. The former Stanford University computer science student also bet on the payments specialist Stripe, whose valuation is today estimated at $65 billion, before a possible IPO.
Participations in several start-ups
Sam Altman also notably placed $375 million of his own money in the start-up Helion, dedicated to nuclear fusion, and $180 million in the capital of Retro Biosciences, a biotech specializing in cellular reprogramming. In a blog post published in 2014, he claimed to have increased his investment in five companies, including Stripe, by 100 times.
Sam Altman has taken direct stakes in several start-ups, but also relies on the investment company Hydrazine Capital, which he co-founded in 2012, as well as Apollo Projects, created with his brothers Max and Jack.
The 30-year-old jack-of-all-trades has affirmed on several occasions, notably during an interview with the New York Times in March 2023, that he does not hold any shares in OpenAI, valued at $80 billion, according to the daily, during a sale titles in February. Co-founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, OpenAI was launched into orbit with the November 2022 launch of the generative AI interface ChatGPT, which has positioned itself at the forefront of the sector.
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In November, Sam Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI by the board of directors, before being reinstated less than a week later, with most employees threatening to leave the company to protest the impromptu dismissal.