Altman grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and he was a computer whiz from a young age.Sam Altman is a Missouri native. f11photo/Shutterstock He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old, according to The New Yorker. He attended John Burroughs School, a private, non-sectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.He told The New Yorker that having a Mac helped him with his sexuality. Altman came out to his parents when he was 16.Altman has been open about his sexuality since he was a teenager. Matt Weinberger/Business Insider "Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker. "And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you're eleven or twelve."Altman came out as gay to the whole community after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality."What Sam did changed the school," his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. "It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world."Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before he and two of his classmates dropped out to work full time on their mobile app.Like many famous tech founders, Altman is a college dropout. turtix/Shutterstock The app shared a user's location with their friends. Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit, according to The Business of Business.Loopt eventually reached a $175 million valuation, but it didn't garner enough interest, so the founders sold it for $43 million in 2012.Altman has been a tech founder since his early 20s. Drew Angerer/Getty The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.One of Loopt's cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million.Peter Thiel has backed multiple companies founded by Altman. Marco Bello/Getty Images That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75% of that moneyinto YC companies, and led Reddit's Series B fundraising round.He told The New Yorker, "you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced."In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the startup accelerator.Altman was a teacher and a major player in the startup world in 2014. Drew Angerer/Getty Images While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup," in the fall of 2014. The next year, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at 29 years old.After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch.Altman at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Idaho in 2016. Drew Angerer/Getty He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said to The New Yorker, "Under Sam, the level of YC's ambition has gone up 10x."He finds interesting and expensive ways to spend his free time.The Koenigsegg Regera is a rare Swedish sports car that can cost nearly $5 million. Martyn Lucy/Getty Images In April (the same month he made Forbes' billionaire list,) Altman was spotted in Napa, California driving an ultra-rare Swedish supercar. The Koenigsegg Regera is seriously fast, able to go from zero to 250 miles per hour in less than 30 seconds. There are only 80 of these cars known to exist, and they can cost up to $4.65 million.He once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla, according to The New Yorker. He's said he likes racing cars and renting planes to fly all over California.Separately, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate that "I prep for survival," and warned of either a "lethal synthetic virus," AI attacking humans, or nuclear war."I try not to think about it too much," Altman told the founders in 2016. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."Altman's mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, "Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He'll call and say he has a headacheand he'll have Googled it, so there's some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, that it's just stress."Altman has a brother, Jack, who is a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform.Julia and Jack Altman live in the Mission District of San Francisco. San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Contributor Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies. They're startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX at the time.Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage in San Francisco. Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair Their goal for the non-profit artificial intelligence company was to make sure AI doesn't wipe out humans."We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?" Musk told The New York Times in 2015. "We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity."Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI along with Altman and Musk, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Thiel.Altman stepped down as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He stayed in a chairman role at the accelerator.Altman went all-in on OpenAI in 2019. @sama At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."Altman said OpenAI had "never made any revenue" and that it had "no current plans to make revenue.""We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said at the time, according to TechCrunch.Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it turned away from being a nonprofit company into a "capped profit" corporation.OpenAI changed from nonprofit status in 2019. Skye Gould/Business Insider "We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance," OpenAI said on its blog. "Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit which we are calling a 'capped-profit' company."OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.Altman in 2014 in New York City. Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI's AI models for him, WSJ reported. The pair announced their business partnership on LinkedIn.Current and former insiders at OpenAI told Fortune that after Altman took over as CEO, and after the investment from Microsoft, the company started focusing more on developing natural language processing.The company shifted its focus after Altman took over. Brian Ach/Getty Altman and OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, said the move to focus on large language models was the best way for the company to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a system that has broad human-level cognitive abilities.In 2021, Altman and cofounders Alex Blania and Max Novendstern launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin.Worldcoin founders Alex Blania and Sam Altman. Marc Olivier Le Blanc/Worldcoin It wanted to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb. The company was started in 2020, but stopped operating in a few countries in 2022 due to logistics issues, Bloomberg reported. In January, Worldcoin tweeted that it had reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.Under Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT.A screenshot of a Dall-E webpage. OpenAI Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are known as "generative" AI, meaning the bot creates its own artwork and text based on information it is fed.After ChatGPT was released on November 30, Altman tweeted that it had reached over 1 million users in five days.ChatGPT was made public so OpenAI could use feedback from users to improve the bot.ChatGPT's success was nearly instant. Getty Images A few days after its launch, Altman said that it "is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness." Altman postedthat ChatGPT was "great" for "fun creative inspiration," but "not such a good idea" to look up facts.ChatGPT recently began testing a paid version of ChatGPT called "ChatGPT Professional" that is supposed to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman posted that OpenAI "will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering."In January 2023, Microsoft again announced it was making a "multibillion dollar" investment into OpenAI.OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft further solidified its success. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Although specifics of the investment were not shared, it is believed it is worth $10 billion. Before Microsoft's investment, other venture capitalists wanted to buy shares from OpenAI employees in a tender offer that valued the company at around $29 billion.Altman is still interested in nuclear fusion and invested $375 million in Helion Energy in 2022.Altman said he's "super excited" about Helion's future. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images "Helion is more than an investment to me," Altman told TechCrunch. "It's the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I'm just super excited about what's going to happen there."He told TechCrunch that he's "happy there's a fusion race," to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.Last year, OpenAI launched its pilot subscription plan for ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month.Users can pay for more features on ChatGPT. FLORENCE LO/Reuters People who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus get benefits such as access to the site even when traffic is high, faster responses from the bot, and first access to new features and ChatGPT improvements.The subscription is only available for people in the US, and OpenAI said it will soon start inviting people on the waitlist to join.Altman wrote that OpenAI's mission is to make sure AGI "benefits all of humanity.Artificial general intelligence is a big talking point for Altman. JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images "If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility," Altman wrote on OpenAI's blog.Despite its potential, Altman said artificial general intelligence comes with "serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption." But instead of stopping its development, Altman said "society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."Altman went on to share the principles that OpenAI "care about most," including "the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared."Altman said he and OpenAI are "a little bit scared" of AI's potential as it continues to develop.GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4) is a multimodal large language model from Open AI, a predecessor to GPT-4o. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images In an interview with ABC News, Altman said he thinks "people should be happy that we're a little bit scared" of generative AI systems as they develop.Altman said he doesn't think AI systems should only be developed in a lab."You've got to get these products out into the world and make contact with reality, make our mistakes while the stakes are low," he said.