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AI, online payments and nuclear fusion: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a billionaire

To make his fortune, the young entrepreneur played on all fronts. The head of generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenAI, Sam Altman, is a dollar billionaire according to Forbes magazine, a fortune he owes to non-OpenAI investments that he says are not backed.

The 38-year-old entrepreneur made his first millions from the 2012 resale of location-sharing social network Loopt, a fledgling company he co-founded in 2005 at age 19. Today his assets consist, in particular, of shares in the social network Reddit, in which the funds he created control almost 8%, totaling almost $600 million.

However, Sam Altman only owns a portion of this stake, which is worth less than $100 million. The former Stanford University computer science student also bet on payments specialist Stripe, now valued at $65 billion, ahead of a possible IPO.

Participation in several startups

Sam Altman also invested $375 million of his own money into nuclear fusion startup Helion and $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a biotech company specializing in cellular reprogramming. In a blog post published in 2014, he stated that he had increased his investments in five companies, including Stripe, by 100 times.

Sam Altman has taken direct stakes in several startups, but also relies on the investment firm Hydrazine Capital, which he co-founded in 2012, as well as Apollo Projects, created with his brothers Max and Jack.

The 30-year-old jack-of-all-trades has repeatedly confirmed, most notably during a March 2023 interview with the New York Times, that he does not own any shares of OpenAI, worth $80 billion as reported daily during the sell-off in February. OpenAI, co-founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, was launched into orbit with the November 2022 launch of generative AI interface ChatGPT, which has taken a leading position in the sector.

OpenAI’s board of directors briefly fired Sam Altman in November, and he was reinstated less than a week later, with most employees threatening to leave the company in protest of the impromptu dismissal.

Source: Le Parisien

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