OpenAI founder Samuel Harris Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the eldest of four siblings. His mother was a dermatologist, and his father, who passed away in May 2018, was a real estate broker. Altman studied computer science at Stanford University, where he co-founded "Loopt," a location-based social networking app that helped him enter the tech industry. He dropped out without earning a degree.

In 2011, Sam Altman joined "Y Combinator," a well-known startup accelerator, and became its president in 2014, a role he held until 2019. During his tenure, Altman, who has a net worth of $1.2 billion as of 2025, supported and helped launch several notable companies, including Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit research organization dedicated to developing safe and beneficial artificial intelligence.