Sam Altman is now on the list of billionaires: where his fortune comes from ?

© TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Since the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has become one of the most influential people in the tech sector. And now he is also in the list of billionaires published by Forbes. Sam Altman is in 2692nd place on this ranking, with a fortune estimated at at least $1 billion. But if you think Sam Altman became a billionaire thanks to OpenAI, you're wrong.

OpenAI: Sam Altman has no direct stake

Indeed, the CEO doesn't even have any stake directly in the company, which is supervised by a non-profit organization.“Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t directly own any equity. His only interest lies indirectly in a Y Combinator investment fund which made a small investment in OpenAI before he went full time”, we can read on an OpenAI page, which explains the structure of the organization. On the Forbes list, Sam Altman is not classified in the technology category, since his fortune comes rather from very good investments that he has made.

In order to estimate Sam Altman's net worth, Forbes indicates that it had to analyze more than a dozen regulatory files, and survey more than a dozen people who know the investments of the boss of OpenAI. According to the magazine, the bulk of Sam Altman's fortune comes from investments he made in startups, including Reddit and Stripe, in their early days. More recently, Sam Altman also invested in Helion, specializing in nuclear energy, and in Retro Biosciences, a startup that researches longevity.

Investment funds, startups, properties

Specifically, Forbes estimates that Sam Altman's shares in funds that have invested in startups , like Hydrazine Capital and Apollo Projects, are worth $145 million. As for his shares in Helion and Retro, they would be worth $555 million. Otherwise, Sam Altman would have shares worth $90 million in the funds of Y Combinator (the startup accelerator of which he was already president). And, finally, he reportedly has properties in California and Hawaii, as well as small personal investments.

Forbes warns, however, that Sam Altman's fortune may be higher than his estimate, citing other sources of wealth that are not known.

The art of finding the right investments ?

Forbes article describes Sam Altman as a tech genius who , from the age of 8, learned to program on a Macintosh. He studied computer science at Stanford from 2003, but left university two years later to create a location-sharing application called Loopt. In 2012, when Loopt had become a well-known startup in Silicon Valley, it was sold for $43.4 million.

And it seems to be the real starting point of Sam Altman's investment career. Indeed, in a blog post published in 2014, he indicates that he began seed investments in 20120, but that he was significantly more active from 2012. In any case, between 2012 and 2014, Sam Altman invested in 40 companies, including 5 that were in the very good investment category. Indeed, these 5 companies had seen their valuations multiplied by 100.

And, at the time, Sam Altman attributed his success to the fact that he chose to invest in new startups that other investors did not believe in. “At first, great companies often seem like bad ideas. At a minimum, if they look good, the round will probably be too expensive and many other people will probably start similar companies”, he wrote in this 2014 post.

• Sam Altman is now on Forbes' list of billionaires, with a fortune estimated at at least $1 billion
• This fortune does not come from OpenAI, since it has no direct stake in this company< /li>
• However, Sam Altman has made many good investments, especially after the sale of his Loopt app

< blockquote>

📍 To not miss any news from Presse-citron, follow us on Google News and WhatsApp.

[ ]