Sam Altman’s net worth changed a lot throughout the years but truly skyrocketed after Reddit went public in recent weeks.
Sam Altman is quickly becoming the most revolutionary tech pioneer of the XXI century. He will be remembered as one of the early AI geniuses, especially thanks to his revolutionary software ChatGPT. Being the founder and CEO of OpenAI also allowed Sam Altman to amass a significant net worth. But how rich is Sam Altman exactly?
Like many of his peers, Sam Altman was born in a middle-class American family, with dreams of becoming a great tech entrepreneur. He then studied computer science at Stanford University. But college was too restricting for him, so he dropped out almost immediately to start his career as a tech entrepreneur.
This places Altman in the same category as other famous tech pioneers who abandoned college to follow their dreams. The list includes the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Sam Altman founded Loopt, his first company, at the age of 19 in 2005. This was an early social network that allowed users to share their geographical location with their friends circle. Eventually, this system was integrated into Facebook and Twitter.
Indeed, Sam Altman was a pioneer of surveillance capitalism before artificial intelligence. “Surveillance Capitalism” is the sociological theory developed by Shoshana Zuboff whereby tech companies became profitable by selling personal data to advertisement companies. Today, surveillance capitalism is at the forefront of most business models in tech giants.
After selling off Loopt to Green Dot Company, Sam Altman continued his entrepreneurship career in other sectors, investing in companies the likes of Airbnb, and Pinterest.
Sam Altman net worth: how much did he earn from ChatGPT
Sam Altman started amassing a small fortune thanks to his successful investments. But his life would completely change in 2015 when he founded, along with Elon Musk, OpenAI.
OpenAI is a non-profit company that researches artificial intelligence softwares. It became popular when, in 2021, they released DALL-E: a software capable of generating images from a small prompt.
With DALL-E, people could ask the AI to create an image based on any request, however random or abstract it might be.
Later, OpenAI developed ChatGPT, a text-based software that could create any amount of written content from, again, a small prompt. With ChatGPT people could create essays, articles , or even small messages just by suggesting their wishes to the software.
And it was ChatGPT that most attracted the attention of Microsoft. The company, sensing new opportunities in artificial intelligence, finally decided to buy OpenAI for $10 billion.
Sam Altman was, of course, already a wealthy man. His net worth in early January 2023 was around $250 million.
It was the recent Reddit IPO announcement that sent Altman’s net worth through the roof. Altman is the third-largest shareholder of Reddit, whose current market cap sits at $7.31 billion.
He also reportedly invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a medical startup trying to add 10 years to the human lifespan, as well as $375 million in Helicon, a company that developed an alternative method for nuclear fusion.
As of March 2024, Sam Altman’s net worth is $2 billion, mostly coming from Reddit’s recent IPO.
