GoKawiilWe met Altman in a generic-looking conference room on the eighth floor. “People used to tell me about decision fatigue, and I didn’t get it,” Altman told us. “Now I wear a gray sweater and jeans every day, and even picking which gray sweater out of my closet—I’m, like, I wish I didn’t have to think about that.” Altman has a youthful appearance—he is slender, with wide-set blue eyes and tousled hair—but he is now forty, and he and Mulherin have a one-year-old son, delivered by a surrogate. “I’m sure, like, being President of the United States would be a much more stressful job, but of all the jobs that I think I could reasonably do, this is the most stressful one I can imagine,” he said, making eye contact with one of us, then with the other. “The way that I’ve explained this to my friends is: ‘This was the most fun job in the world until the day we launched ChatGPT.’ We were making these massive scientific discoveries—I think we did the most important piece of scientific discovery in, I don’t know, many decades.” He cast his eyes down. “And then, since the launch of ChatGPT, the decisions have gotten very difficult.”
Altman grew up in Clayton, Missouri, an affluent suburb of St. Louis, as the eldest of four siblings. His mother, Connie Gibstine, is a dermatologist; his father, Jerry Altman, was a real-estate broker and a housing activist. Altman attended a Reform synagogue and a private preparatory school that he has described as “not the kind of place where you would really stand up and talk about being gay.” In general, though, the family’s wealthy suburban circles were relatively liberal. When Altman was sixteen or seventeen, he said, he was out late in a predominantly gay neighborhood in St. Louis and was subjected to a brutal physical attack and homophobic slurs. Altman did not report the incident, and he was reluctant to give us more details on the record, saying that a fuller telling would “make me look like I’m manipulative or playing for sympathy.” He dismissed the idea that this event, and his sexuality broadly, was significant to his identity. But, he said, “probably that has, like, some deep-seated psychological thing—that I think I’m over but I’m not—about not wanting more conflict.”
Altman’s attitude in childhood, his brother told The New Yorker, in 2016, was “I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything.” He went to Stanford, where he attended regular off-campus poker games. “I think I learned more about life and business from that than I learned in college,” he later said.
All Stanford students are ambitious, but many of the most enterprising among them drop out. The summer after his sophomore year, Altman went to Massachusetts to join the inaugural batch of entrepreneurs at Y Combinator, a “startup incubator” co-founded by the renowned software engineer Paul Graham. Each entrant joined Y.C. with an idea for a startup. (Altman’s batch mates included founders of Reddit and Twitch.) Altman’s project, eventually called Loopt, was a proto social network that used the locations of people’s flip phones to tell their friends where they were. The company reflected his drive, and a tendency to interpret ambiguous situations to his advantage. Federal rules required that phone carriers be able to track the locations of phones for emergency services; Altman struck deals with carriers to tap these capabilities for the company’s use.
“These numbers indicate that somebody here has the soul of a poet.” Cartoon by Emily Flake Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Most of Altman’s employees at Loopt liked him, but some said that they were struck by his tendency to exaggerate, even about trivial things. One recalled Altman bragging widely that he was a champion Ping-Pong player—“like, Missouri high-school Ping-Pong champ”—and then proving to be one of the worst players in the office. (Altman says that he was probably joking.) As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup.