After the November 2023 vote that removed Sam Altman as OpenAI's chief executive, Ilya Sutskever publicly apologised. He then joined the employee letter demanding that the board resign, the very board he sat on. Altman was back within a week. Sutskever left the board and, in May 2024, the company he had co-founded.
He was born in 1986 in Gorky, in the Soviet Union, to a Russian-Jewish family. At five he emigrated to Israel and grew up in Jerusalem. In eighth grade he started taking classes at the Open University of Israel. At sixteen he moved to Canada, where he studied mathematics at the University of Toronto and went on to a PhD in computer science under Geoffrey Hinton.
In eighth grade he started taking classes at the Open University of Israel.
In 2012 he, Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky built AlexNet, the image-recognition network that helped start the deep-learning era. Google bought Hinton's company the next year and hired him into Google Brain, where he worked on sequence-to-sequence learning. At the end of 2015 he left to co-found OpenAI as its chief scientist and helped lead the research behind ChatGPT.
Then came the rupture. He reportedly compiled a 70-page dossier on Altman before voting. The reversal that followed was public and awkward for a man known for research rather than politics.
On 19 June 2024 he announced Safe Superintelligence on X with Daniel Gross, a former head of Apple's AI efforts, and Daniel Levy, an investor and former OpenAI researcher. He said the first product would be the safe superintelligence itself, with nothing else until then. In September 2024 it raised $1 billion at about $5 billion from SV Angel, DST Global, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. A Greenoaks-led round in 2025 set the valuation near $30 billion, with no revenue and about 20 employees in March. Google Cloud agreed to supply chips in April 2025.
The company split between Palo Alto and an office in Tel Aviv. In 2025 Meta tried to buy it, and Sutskever rebuffed the offer. In July 2025, Gross left for Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Sutskever became chief executive. On 27 July 2026 Nvidia announced a partnership to expand SSI's computing power by an order of magnitude; Reuters reported a $5 billion investment, though the companies have not confirmed the number.
Bloomberg put his fortune at $13.8 billion in July 2026. The lesson is the cost of a split decision: one vote can end a career at a company you built. But a founder who owns up to it, and whose reputation rests on real research, may still raise a billion dollars for a second attempt.