Meet ChatGPT boss Sam Altman, who’s back in the CEO chair: Microsoft briefly hired him before his OpenAI return, he came out as LGBT in high school, and he splurges his millions on Tesla and McLaren
- A child prodigy whose life was changed by a Macintosh computer, Altman dropped out of Stanford University to found tech start-up Loopt, and now his net worth sits at an estimated US$500 million
- His partner Oliver Mulherin is a software engineer who used to work at Meta – the couple live in San Francisco and spend the weekends in Napa, California
From Silicon Valley and beyond, all eyes have been fixed on Sam Altman and the drama at artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. First he was fired, then kingpin Microsoft got involved by briefly hiring him, and then OpenAI staff took a clear stand with support for Altman. Now he’s back at the helm of OpenAI – and the world is still reeling.
Sam Altman was a child prodigy
At just three years old, he fixed the family VCR. When he was eight, his parents got him a Macintosh LC II. Per New York Magazine, the computer changed everything, as it was “this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after”.
Altman grew up in St Louis, Missouri. He is the eldest child and has three siblings: Max, Jack and Annie, who is nine years younger than him. His mum Connie Gibstine was a dermatologist and his dad Jerry Altman, a property broker. “I am a midwestern Jew from an awkward childhood at best,” Sam said about himself to New York Magazine.
He came out as gay while in high school
Altman came out in high school, surprising his mother who thought he was “unisexual”, per New York Magazine. He commented during a 2020 podcast that his school was not the kind where “you would really stand up and talk about being gay and that was OK”.
At 17, he was asked to speak for National Coming Out Day, which a group of students protested against. Altman responded by appealing to the wider student body and ended with the lines: “Either you have tolerance to open community or you don’t, and you don’t get to pick and choose.”
The tech boss said one of the best things his parents did for him was to shower him with constant affirmations of love, telling him he could do anything, New York Magazine reported.
He dropped out of Stanford
