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OpenAI Made Sam Altman Famous. His Investments Made Him A Billionaire.
CEO Sam Altman famously has no equity in OpenAI, but startup bets like Reddit, Stripe and Helion have made him a billionaire anyway, a Forbes investigation found.
In the summer of 2017, Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra started frantically messaging his investors one by one. His startup had tested out a pending update to Google’s web browser Chrome, and, due to one seemingly innocuous code change, Superhuman’s smart email service had broken overnight. The damage seemed inadvertent — no one at Google seemed to realize anyone was building on top of that otherwise dusty code — but for Superhuman, the crisis was “existential.”
The venture capital firms Vohra contacted all shrugged helplessly, claiming no direct line into the right person at the Googleplex. By Friday night, Vohra turned to messaging his angel investors, including Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. “I just so happen to be at a party standing next to Sundar [Pichai],” Altman wrote back in minutes, name-dropping Google’s CEO. “Standby.”
The next morning, a vice president at Google reached out with an apology and an invite to the tech giant’s San Francisco office. In the years since, Superhuman has enjoyed a close partnership with Google, Vohra says, including being asked to test out more recent changes to Chrome. All because of Altman, who had decided to invest, through a personal fund he managed, after a single 30-minute meeting a year before. “Sam stuck his neck out for a founder of a startup that was, for him, a small investment,” Vohra tells Forbes. “But for us, it was a crucial moment in our trajectory.”
In the right place at the right time. Seemingly endlessly well-connected. Fast-moving and decisive. Founders backed by Altman echo such observations of the OpenAI CEO, who has become increasingly a household name since the rise of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the explosion of interest around generative AI. Altman has little time for startups these days, he told Forbes recently. But he remains at th
