Why Sam Altman owns no shares in OpenAI

Transcript

This guy built the fastest growing app in history and doesn't own a single share of it. Meet Sam Altman. In 2005, Sam is 19 when he drops out of Stanford to build an app called Looped. He grinds for seven years and almost nobody uses it. But Sam still sells it for $43 million because the buyer wants his team more than his app. Two years later, Paul Graham hands him Y Combinator. Graham says Sam understands startups better than anyone he knows, including himself. Now Sam meets everyone who matters in tech. And in 2015, he uses it to assemble OpenAI with Elon Musk's investment. The best researchers alive and Microsoft's partnership. OpenAI starts as a nonprofit and Sam takes zero shares. By 2022, OpenAI believes it has the most powerful AI on Earth locked in its lab. So Sam does what nobody had dared and hands it to the public, free in a simple chat box. His own team doubts it's ready. But Sam launches anyway, set on being first to market. There's no launch event or ads. Word spreads on its own and in two months 100 million people are using it. No app has ever grown faster. A year later, his board tries to fire him, but $738 of $770 employees threaten to quit. And within days he is back as CEO. Today, OpenAI is valued at $852 billion. And the man steering it still owns none of it.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.