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.”
“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 that neglecting loved ones to be more productive is “a very stupid tradeoff.” Parenthood has only sharpened that sensibility.
“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.
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.
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.”
