The Five-Day Firing

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.