Sam Altman is an American 🏷️#entrepreneur and 🏷️#investor who co-founded 📝OpenAI in 2015 and has served as its chief executive since 2019. He was previously president of 📝Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and he is a longtime 🏷️#blogger whose essays on technology, startups, and AI are widely read.

Altman left 📝Stanford University to co-found the location-sharing startup Loopt in 2005, which was acquired in 2012. At OpenAI he led the launch of 📝ChatGPT and the company's evolution from a nonprofit lab to a capped-profit company and, in October 2025, to OpenAI Group PBC; in November 2023 the board briefly removed him as CEO before reinstating him five days later. Outside OpenAI he co-founded and chairs Tools for Humanity, the company behind the World iris-verification project, and is a major investor in fusion developer Helion Energy, stepping down as its board chair in March 2026 as Helion discussed selling power to OpenAI. In September 2026 he said OpenAI would not go public before 2027, calling an IPO "ill-advised" given AI safety concerns.

Contexts

• 🏷️#orange-sticky (See: 📝My Sticky Wall)