Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Before OpenAI he served as President of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, then led the company through the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, which reached 100 million users faster than any prior consumer app.Source: Public record / OpenAI

Why did OpenAI shut down Sora and cancel the Disney deal?

OpenAI shut down Sora, its consumer video product, on 26 April 2026 to reallocate resources to robotics and autonomous software. Sam Altman told Bloomberg he 'felt terrible' informing Disney, which had planned a $1 billion investment in OpenAI that was cancelled as a result.Source: Bloomberg / Disney Q2 FY26 earnings, May 2026

What happened when Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI in 2023?

In November 2023, the OpenAI board dismissed Altman as CEO. He was reinstated within five days after almost all staff threatened to resign and Microsoft offered to hire the departing team. The episode led to a governance restructuring, converting OpenAI to a public-benefit corporation structure.Source: Public record / OpenAI governance filings

Background

Samuel Harris Altman is the Chief Executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research company he co-founded with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman in December 2015. Before OpenAI, Altman served as President of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, overseeing the most influential startup accelerator in Silicon Valley and shaping the careers of founders at Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and hundreds of other companies. His trajectory from YC to OpenAI represents one of the most deliberate pivots from supporting the startup ecosystem to directly competing within it at scale.

Under Altman's leadership, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, reaching 100 million users in two months, faster than any consumer application previously recorded. The company subsequently launched GPT-4, Sora (an AI video generation model), and a succession of o-series reasoning models, raising capital at valuations exceeding $150 billion by 2025. In November 2023, Altman was briefly dismissed by the OpenAI board, only to be reinstated within five days after a near-complete staff walkout; the episode triggered a governance restructuring that converted OpenAI from a non-profit-controlled entity to a public-benefit corporation structure. OpenAI filed a confidential draft prospectus with US regulators around 22 May 2026 and confirmed the filing publicly on 9 June 2026, targeting an IPO as early as September at a valuation above $1 trillion, against a projected 2026 operating loss of approximately $14 billion.

Altman has made two publicly notable interventions on the AI-jobs debate. He acknowledged publicly that "AI washing" is real: some companies overstate AI's role in layoffs they would have made for conventional reasons, a point that cuts against the narrative of acute AI-driven displacement even as OpenAI's own models are the most widely cited tools in corporate restructuring announcements. In the media-AI context, he told Bloomberg he "felt terrible" informing Disney's Josh D'Amaro that OpenAI was reallocating Sora resources away from consumer video towards robotics and autonomous software, effectively ending a planned $1 billion Disney investment in OpenAI. His decisions on which products OpenAI prioritises carry direct consequences for content-industry deals, publisher licensing negotiations, and the pace at which AI displaces human creative labour.