Altman is known to have no equity in OpenAI, but his bets on startups like Reddit, Stripe, and Helion have still secured him a spot on the Forbes billionaire ranking.
The list is headed by Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury goods company LVMH, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.
Sam Altman became the face of the AI boom when his company released ChatGPT in 2022 — but he owes his billion-dollar fortune not to OpenAI but to smart investments in companies like Reddit, which was recently listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the payment company Stripe, which is currently valued at $65 billion.
The 36-year-old entrepreneur has also invested in promising new ventures, such as nuclear energy company Helion and startup Retro Biosciences, which is working on a technology that could extend human life by 10 years.
Altman is also associated with by the Worldcoin project — A month ago, the project’s main crypto token reached its highest price ever at $11.82, and over the past year, it has grown by 337.35%. Worldcoin is ready to give every person on the planet a digital identity card and a certain amount of cryptocurrency in exchange for biometric data.
OpenAI — the company that made Sam Altman famous — is currently valued at $80 billion. Last year, it went through a boardroom shakeup — and almost lost his position as CEO if Microsoft hadn’t intervened. Altman and OpenAI are also trying to deal with a lawsuit from Elon Musk — who co-founded the company and now claims that it has strayed from its purpose «to serve humanity» and instead focused on making money.
In 2023, Altman was named to the hundreds of the most influential personalities in the world according to Time.