# The Five-Day Firing
*A Biography of Sam Altman* — Legendary Biographies No. 101

- **Subject:** Samuel Harris Altman
- **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge
- **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 214 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-098-0)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Alasdair Finn (ISBN 979-8-90623-184-0)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/101-the-five-day-firing.html

## About this book

November 17, 2023, 11:53 a.m. Pacific Time. The OpenAI board of directors fires Sam Altman as chief executive officer. The text of their statement says he has "not been consistently candid in his communications." Five days later — after a near-total employee revolt (743 of 770 OpenAI employees sign a letter threatening to follow Altman to Microsoft) and a long weekend of mediation — Altman is reinstated, the board is reconstituted with new outside directors, and an internal investigation conducted by WilmerHale concludes in March 2024 that the board's decision-making process was "unreasonable." Altman has since launched GPT-5 (March 2025) and raised an additional $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation.

Sterling Aldridge's biography opens earlier — in Clayton, Missouri, where Samuel Harris Altman was born in 1985, the eldest of four children of a real-estate developer and a dermatologist — and follows the arc through the Burroughs School, the Stanford computer-science dropout, the 2005 Loopt founding through Y Combinator's second batch, the seven-year Loopt run and the Green Dot acquisition, the YC presidency (2014-2019), the Helion Energy and Worldcoin founding, the OpenAI 2015 founding with Elon Musk and Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the 2019 Musk departure, the Microsoft $1 billion investment, the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, and the November 2023 five-day firing.

What emerges is a portrait of the Stanford-dropout founder whose twenty-year ascent through the Silicon Valley founder track has made him the de facto public face of contemporary artificial intelligence — and the November 2023 board crisis that the company and the industry have spent the years since trying to absorb.

## Contents

1. The Boy Who Typed
2. The Farm
3. Loopt
4. Coming Out, Coming Up
5. The Accelerator
6. The Network
7. The President
8. The Dinner at Rosewood
9. The Pivot
10. Scaling Laws
11. GPT-3 and the API
12. ChatGPT
13. The Microsoft Deal
14. The Coup
15. Five Days
16. The Ilya Question
17. The Testimony
18. The Alignment Problem
19. The Blip

## Questions

**Who is The Five-Day Firing about?**

Samuel Harris Altman. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Five-Day Firing — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,322 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 65,500 words, 19 chapters, 214 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads.

His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library.

He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.