Who is Sam Altman, the AI pioneer Elon Musk branded a ‘swindler’?

Sam Altman, the tech titan and leading AI pioneer, has found himself locked in a bitter spat with former business partner Elon Musk this week amid a row over the nature of his company – Open AI.

Musk, who co-founded the firm, has criticised its attempt to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit model as part of a series of high profile clashes with his colleague-turned-competitor.

But less is known about the man behind the ever-growing prevalence of generative AI through his ChatGPT platform.

An influential Silicon Valley figure for more than a decade, Altman, 39, was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023 and in the same year topped a list compiled by the Jerusalem Post of the world’s 50 most influential Jews.

He once told Time Magazine that his being a “midwestern Jew”, explains his “exact mental model – very optimistic and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point”.

But despite his optimism, two months after October 7, the left-leaning Altman – a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his first term who has since managed to place himself at the centre of the new administration’s AI agenda – admitted on X: “For a long time I said that antisemitism, particularly on the American left, was not as bad as people claimed. I’d like to just state that I was totally wrong.

“I still don’t understand it, really. Or know what to do about it. But it is so f*****,” he wrote.

U.S. President Donald Trump talks to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, January 21, 2025 (Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)Getty Images

The tech mogul is most widely known as the CEO of OpenAI, which he co-founded alongside Musk and others in 2015. With a net worth of some $1.2 billion, he also serves as chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc and Helion Energy and was briefly the CEO and one of the largest shareholders of Reddit.

The eldest of four siblings, Altman was born in April 1985 to Jewish parents, a real estate broker and a dermatologist, in Chicago, Illinois before moving with his family to the suburbs of St Louis, Missouri. 

In the early 90s, at the age of eight, he received his first computer, an early Apple Mac, on which he began learning how to code. He attended a private school in Ladue, Missouri and, after years of taking apart computer hardware for fun, went on to study computer science at Stanford University.

Altman, who is openly gay, disclosed his sexuality at the age of 17 while still in high school after some fellow students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. In an interview with Esquire, he said computers and online communities enabled him to navigate being gay in a conservative part of the country.

In 2005, aged 19, Altman dropped out of university to co-found a tech startup, Loopt, which let smartphone users selectively share their live location. In 2012, after Loopt failed to gain significant user traction, the company was acquired in a deal valued at $43.4 million.

Altman then took a year off, during which he said he “read many dozens of textbooks”, learning about the fields he was most drawn to, including nuclear engineering, investment, synthetic biology, and AI.

In 2011, he joined Y Combinator, an “accelerator” firm which has provided thousands of startups with funding and guidance in exchange for shares, and which he served as president of from 2014 until 2019.

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a plenary session at the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley, England (Credit: Alastair Grant - WPA Pool/Getty Images)Getty Images

But since 2015, he has put his focus primarily on AI, joining Musk and others in the technological arms race.

Their firm, OpenAI, was started as a research company with the stated goal of building generative AI to the benefit of humanity. Musk has since become a vocal critic of the company, alleging they prioritise profit over its use to humanity, a claim Altman and the company dismissed.

The success of the company’s ChatGPT programme has made him one of the most famous tech founders in the world.

On his celebrity status and his relationship with Judaism, he has previously said: “One of the weird things about being Jewish and getting internet famous is, like, most of your online experience is people saying like horrible things about Jews.” He added that, since October 7, that experience has been “on double time”.

He also said he was “wrong” to have once assumed that the world had “moved on” from antisemitism. Finding a solution to antisemitism, he said, “seems harder than AI.”

But Altman believes AI could be at a “printing press” moment for its historical significance. In a 2021 blog post, he said: “The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel.”

Posting to his blog on Sunday, Altman said in reference to the unparalleled prospects AI will afford humanity in the coming years: “Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshal the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025; everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine. There is a great deal of talent right now without the resources to fully express itself, and if we change that, the resulting creative output of the world will lead to tremendous benefits for us all.”

Altman has been in a relationship with Australian software engineer Oliver Mulherin since 2023. They were married in January 2024 and live together in San Francisco, where much of the AI industry is based.