A note before we start: I've done my best to research and verify the information in this piece, drawing on publicly available sources including Britannica, PBS, Yahoo Finance and reporting from multiple technology publications. As with any profile of this kind, details can vary between sources or change over time - particularly around financial figures and internal company dynamics. I'd encourage you to follow the links and read the primary sources for yourself.
If the story of Anthropic is one of siblings walking away from a company on a point of principle, the story of OpenAI is something rather more dramatic. It involves a $1 billion pledge that largely didn't materialise, a co-founder who became one of the company's most vocal critics, a CEO who was fired on a Friday and back at his desk by the following Wednesday and a mission to benefit all of humanity that has become considerably more complicated to define as the years have passed.
It is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary company stories of the modern era.
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Try Relavo FreeOpenAI was founded on 11 December 2015 as a non-profit organisation. The founding group was large and star-studded: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and seven other researchers and scientists. The mission, as stated in its founding charter, was to ensure that artificial general intelligence - AI that matches or surpasses human capability across a wide range of tasks - "benefits all of humanity."
A $1 billion funding pledge was announced, backed by names including Musk, Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Amazon Web Services. In practice, only a fraction of that was received in the early years - a gap between the pledge and the reality that was an early signal of how the idealism of the founding would collide with practical constraints.
The name "Open" reflected a genuine early commitment to transparency and open-source research. What OpenAI has become is considerably more complicated than that name implies.
Sam Altman is the most recognisable face of OpenAI today, though his path there was not straightforward. Born in 1985 in Chicago and raised in Missouri, he attended Stanford University to study computer science before dropping out after two years to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking app. Loopt was eventually sold for $43.4 million in 2012. He then joined Y Combinator, the influential startup accelerator, becoming its president in 2014 - a role that put him at the centre of Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem and gave him early access to investments in companies including Stripe, Airbnb and Reddit.
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became its CEO in 2019. One genuinely surprising detail: according to Yahoo Finance, Altman holds no direct equity in OpenAI despite leading it. His net worth - estimated at around $2 billion by most sources, though figures vary - comes almost entirely from his external investment portfolio rather than from the company he runs. His salary at OpenAI is reportedly around $65,000 a year.
Elon Musk was a co-chair of OpenAI from the beginning and one of its most vocal early advocates. He departed the board in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest with Tesla. The relationship between Musk and OpenAI has since deteriorated significantly. He went on to launch his own AI company, xAI, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman alleging the company had abandoned its founding mission and made a $97.4 billion bid to take control of OpenAI - which the board rejected.
Ilya Sutskever was OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist - arguably its most important technical mind in the early years. He resigned in May 2024 and has since gone on to found his own AI safety company, Safe Superintelligence.
Greg Brockman co-founded OpenAI and served as its President. He took an extended leave of absence in August 2024.
Of OpenAI's original eleven co-founders, according to Britannica, the vast majority have now left the company.
Nothing in OpenAI's history is more dramatic than what happened on 17 November 2023.
The board of directors voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO, stating they had lost confidence in his leadership and that he had not been "consistently candid" with the board. Greg Brockman was simultaneously removed as board chairman and resigned from the company. Several senior researchers also left.
What followed was extraordinary. Microsoft announced it would hire Altman and Brockman to lead a new AI research team. Approximately 738 of OpenAI's 770 employees signed an open letter threatening to leave and join Microsoft if Altman was not reinstated. The board found itself under enormous pressure from investors and staff alike.
By 22 November - just five days after the firing - Altman and Brockman had returned to OpenAI with a reconstructed board. The episode raised serious questions about governance, transparency and the tension between OpenAI's non-profit origins and its increasingly commercial reality - questions that have never been fully resolved.
OpenAI's original structure as a non-profit was always going to struggle to sustain the capital requirements of frontier AI development. In 2019 the company created a "capped profit" entity - a for-profit arm with limits on investor returns - which allowed it to raise the kind of money it needed, starting with a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft.
According to Britannica, in 2025 the company completed a further restructuring into a public benefit corporation. The non-profit parent retains oversight but the company's ability to raise commercial capital has expanded significantly.
As of March 2026, OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round valuing the company at approximately $850 billion - making it one of the most valuable companies on earth. ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, is used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
OpenAI in 2026 is a very different organisation from the idealistic research non-profit of 2015. Most of its original founders have left. Its mission to benefit all of humanity sits alongside the commercial reality of being a near-trillion-dollar company with investors expecting returns. The tension between those two things - between safety and speed, between openness and competitive advantage - has defined every major moment in its history.
One footnote worth mentioning: reports suggest that as part of OpenAI's restructuring, Altman could eventually receive a 7% equity stake in the company. If that happens, his personal financial picture changes dramatically. For now, he remains the CEO of an $850 billion company earning $65,000 a year, whose personal wealth comes from bets he made long before ChatGPT existed.
Sam Altman remains at the centre of it all - a figure who was fired and rehired within a working week, who holds no equity in the company he runs and who is guiding one of the most consequential organisations in the history of technology.
Whatever you think of how the story has unfolded, it is hard to argue it has been anything other than remarkable.
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