As OpenAI prepares for a potential fourth-quarter IPO and fights Elon Musk’s xAI over allegations of stealing trade secrets, CEO Sam Altman has his hands full.
But these days, Altman, 40, is taking things more slowly—at least on the weekends—focusing on his family and scaling OpenAI.
Altman and his husband, Australian software engineer Oliver Mulherin, welcomed a son in February 2025. A year into parenthood, he says the experience is “significantly underhyped.”
“It has been my favorite thing ever in life by far,” Altman told Forbes. “And I don’t think I have anything deep or non-cliche to say about it, other than I thought it was going to be great and it’s much better than I thought it was going to be.”
Fatherhood has come with many changes, including upending Altman’s disciplined daily routine. Before, to maximize his productivity, he focused on and made time for sleep, exercise, and nutrition, he detailed in a 2018 blog post. But now gone are the days of lifting weights and meditating three times a week.
“Now it has all fallen to crap,” he says. “I’ve just accepted that life is going to be chaotic for a few years.”
Altman has always been very vocal about prioritizing family and friends, saying neglecting loved ones to be more productive is “a very stupid tradeoff.” Parenthood has only sharpened that sensibility in him.
“The baseline that something has to beat for me to be willing to spend time on it is so huge now that most other things fell away,” he said.
How Sam Altman creates work-life balance
During the pandemic, Altman purchased a $15.7 million ranch in Napa, Calif., where he spends weekends with Mulherin and their son, hiking without cell phone service. The ranch grows wine grapes and raises cattle, though Altman has been a vegetarian since he was a child.
During the week, it’s back to business in San Francisco, where Altman lives in a $27 million home in Russian Hill. Being incredibly famous in the heart of Silicon Valley adds a complicated dynamic to being a parent. When he’s at the park with his son, Altman gets stopped and pitched startup ideas, he said, drawing unwanted attention.
“I end up living in a weirdly isolated world,” Altman says. “I fight that every inch…I think the more you let the world build a bubble around you, the more insane you go.”
Fame has also started to constrain Altman’s relationship with his son. He used to write letters to his son about work challenges, he said, but stopped when he realized they could be used as discovery in a lawsuit. Pages of OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s personal diary became public as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company.
Altman often thinks about how different the world will be for his son compared to when he was growing up in St. Louis.
“He’s just going to grow up never knowing that there was a world, other than studying history, where every computer wasn’t smarter than him,” he says. “People are wonderfully adaptable, so it won’t seem weird. It’ll be very different.” Altman and Mulherin are expecting another child later this year.
“A lot of people have said, ‘I’m very happy you’re having a kid, because I think you’ll make better decisions for humanity as a whole,’” Altman previously told Bloomberg. “I really wanted to get it right before, and do the best I could. I still really want to, now.”
Altman says he is not too concerned about how he is remembered, though.
“If you’re dead and people remember you, you get zero value out of that,” he said. “Maybe they’ll hear about me, maybe they won’t, but I will have done something that improved other people’s lives, and I will have felt useful.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
