The Bloomberg Billionaires Index first listed Sam Altman at about $2 billion in March 2024. That is the most widely cited estimate, and it dates from that listing, so it may not reflect the company's value today.
Altman's first company was Loopt, the location app he started at 19. He raised more than $30 million in venture capital, but the app never gained much traction, and Green Dot bought it in March 2012 for $43.4 million after seven years.
OpenAI began in December 2015 as a nonprofit. The founders and backers, including Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, pledged about $1 billion, but only about $133 million had arrived by 2021. Altman became CEO in 2019, the year the company adopted a capped-profit structure and Microsoft invested $1 billion.
The company's value has grown sharply since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. A January 2023 Microsoft investment valued it at $29 billion, an April 2025 round at $300 billion, and a round that closed in March 2026 at $852 billion. OpenAI reported revenue of about $13.1 billion in 2025 and an operating loss of about $20.9 billion. It became OpenAI Group PBC in October 2025.