Sam Altman has develop into the face of the AI craze through his role as CEO of OpenAI. But its wealth goes far beyond the startup behind ChatGPT.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which estimates his fortune for the primary time, the 38-year-old’s fortune is estimated at not less than $2 billion. This figure doesn’t include its stake in OpenAI, which was recently valued at $86 billion. Altman has repeatedly said he has no stake in the corporate. On the contrary, most of his traceable wealth is in a network of VC funds and startup investments, and his wealth will grow with Reddit’s IPO, where he’s one of the biggest shareholders.
Altmann declined to comment.
Altman has develop into a globe-trotting artificial intelligence evangelist, using his pulpit to each encourage and terrify together with his predictions about what the technology bodes for elections, the humanities, education, the economy and society. As OpenAI’s ChatGPT fueled its stock market rally, its profile rose — and its final moments within the highlight were stuffed with intrigue and controversy.
Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, sued Altman and the startup on Thursday for violating its founding mission by putting profit over benefiting humanity. Late last 12 months, Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI after the board found that he had not been “consistently honest in his statements,” but he was reinstated just a few days later. (Regulators are currently reviewing his internal communications as part of an investigation into whether investors were misled, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.)
The sources of his wealth are relatively opaque. Altman invests in a number of closely held corporations, resembling Musk’s Neuralink, that don’t disclose his exact holdings and are usually not included in Bloomberg’s wealth calculations.
Most of his traceable net worth comes from $1.2 billion invested in a gaggle of enterprise capital funds variously named Hydrazine Capital, in accordance with regulatory filings and Bloomberg estimates. He has an extra $434 million in Apollo Projects funds that he’s investing in “moonshots,” in accordance with his website.
Some of those VC funds belong to Altman-affiliated entities that own 8.7% of Reddit, a well-liked message board that filed for an initial public offering last week. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the offer could value the corporate at as much as $6.5 billion. That would offer a windfall for funds whose holdings are greater than twice as large as those of Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman.
Altman also donated money to 2 lesser-known startups. In 2021, he led a $500 million investment round in fusion company Helion Energy Inc. and invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, which is working to increase human life expectancy by 10 years.
“That’s a lot,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review last 12 months. “I basically just took all of my liquid net worth and put it into these two companies.”
YC Days
Altman teamed up with Huffman and fellow Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian in Y Combinator’s first cohort of startup incubators in 2005. At the time, he was working at a geolocation company called Loopt, which turned out to be a relative failure for this system’s now-famous enterprise when it was acquired for little greater than it raised.
This was just the start of Altman’s relationship with YC and its affiliated startups. In 2014, he became the incubator’s president and has supported some of probably the most well-known corporations to return through the YC accelerator, including Instacart.
A 2016 New Yorker profile quoted one of YC’s partners as saying that Altman “went away and did something else that we hadn’t known about for a while” — YC Research, which later backed OpenAI.
Altman left YC in 2019 to develop into CEO of OpenAI, which he co-founded several years earlier as a nonprofit. Later, the corporate added a for-profit structure with limits on financial payouts to investors.
In congressional testimony and interviews, Altman said he had no stake in the corporate. While some employees receive equity compensation called profit-sharing units, Altman also doesn’t hold PPUs, company spokesman Steve Sharpe said in an emailed statement.
Sharpe also said Altman wouldn’t receive any financial profit from the OpenAI Startup Fund, which has raised $175 million to take stakes in early-stage artificial intelligence corporations. While regulatory filings show Altman owns greater than 75% of the fund, Sharpe said he has not invested his own money and is not going to make the most of the profits.
– With the assistance of Biz Carson.
Credit : fortune.com
