Sam Altman

Altman dropped out of Stanford to co-found the location-sharing startup Loopt, then rose to prominence as president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, where he backed hundreds of startups. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI alongside Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, becoming its full-time CEO in 2019 as the lab created a capped-profit arm and struck its first major partnership with Microsoft.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 turned OpenAI into one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history and made Altman the public face of generative AI. He survived a dramatic board ouster in November 2023, returning within days with a reconstituted board, and later steered OpenAI through its restructuring into a public benefit corporation.

Altman’s second act has been infrastructure: the Stargate data-center venture with SoftBank and Oracle announced in early 2025, plus a string of multi-gigawatt compute and chip agreements spanning NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom. His pricing strategy — cutting per-token API prices sharply with each generation while committing unprecedented sums to compute — anchors the cost curve the rest of the industry follows.