On 17 November 2023 the board of OpenAI fired its chief executive. Sam Altman was told he had not been consistently candid. His co-founder Greg Brockman quit. Among the votes was Ilya Sutskever, who four years earlier had officiated Brockman's wedding in the OpenAI offices.
It was not the first time a board had come for Altman.
At 17 he came out as gay at his high school, speaking up after some students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker.
He was born in Chicago in 1985, the eldest of four, and the family moved to Clayton, Missouri, in 1989. At eight he got a Macintosh and began coding. At 17 he came out as gay at his high school, speaking up after some students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. He went to Stanford for two years, and at 19 he left to start Loopt, a location app.
What almost nobody remembers is how Loopt went. He raised more than $30 million in venture capital as its chief executive, yet the app never gained much traction. Loopt's board tried twice to remove him as CEO; his supporters said the attempts were not serious. Green Dot bought the company in March 2012 for $43.4 million, a modest outcome after seven years.
OpenAI began in December 2015 as a nonprofit in Brockman's living room. The pledge from Altman, Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and others was about $1 billion, but only about $133 million had arrived by 2021. Musk resigned in 2018. In 2019 OpenAI became a capped-profit company, Microsoft put in $1 billion and Altman became CEO. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and Microsoft added $10 billion two months later.
The firing came after that. Hundreds of staff threatened to leave with him, and Microsoft's chief said Altman would join Microsoft. Five days later Altman was back and the board was replaced. Sutskever later said he regretted taking part. A former board member said Altman had withheld information, which his side disputed.
The fights went on. OpenAI finished converting into a public benefit corporation in October 2025. Musk sued over the change and lost in May 2026. In 2025 it reported revenue of about $13.1 billion and an operating loss of about $20.9 billion, and a spring 2026 round valued it at $852 billion.
For a founder, the quiet thing is this. Altman had already lived through a board that wanted him out, and he knew what it was to be the face of a company whose results did not match its pitch. Whoever holds the final vote can use it, so know who that is before you need to.