Unlike other high-paid tech executives, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he accepts a smaller paycheck to do work he loves.
Altman, a co-founder of the artificial intelligence company, didn't take any equity in OpenAI when it launched in late 2015, he said at the New York Times' DealBook Summit last week. He was more focused on simply getting a front-row seat to the AI arms race, and now makes $76,000 per year as OpenAI's CEO, he said.
"This is my childhood dream job," said Altman, 39. "Getting to work on [artificial general intelligence] and...getting to sit in the room with the smartest researchers in the world and go on this crazy adventure, like that is what I always wanted to do."
OpenAI is currently a nonprofit company with a for-profit arm, which Altman runs. He turned down an equity stake because the organization needed a majority disinterested board to qualify for nonprofit status, and he felt he needed to show he could keep his personal and professional interests separate, he told the "All-In" podcast in May.
OpenAI was most recently valued at $157 billion, meaning even a 1% stake would be worth $1.57 billion. But Altman likely doesn't need the money: The former president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator is already a billionaire, with an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion, primarily from equity he owns in Stripe, Reddit and nuclear fusion firm Helion, according to Forbes.
Working at OpenAI — where a recent tax filing obtained by Bloomberg confirms that Altman took a $76,001 salary last year — is more a labor of love, he said at DealBook: "I think it should at least be understandable that that is worth more to me than any additional money."
It's an unusual setup for a tech CEO. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos still only takes a small base salary — the same amount, $81,840, for decades — but much of his estimated $242.6 billion net worth is from the equity he retains in the company. Elon Musk recently lost a bid to receive a $56 billion salary package, the largest compensation plan for a public company executive in U.S. history, at Tesla.
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Musk, who's also an OpenAI co-founder, is currently suing OpenAI in an attempt to prevent it from fully becoming a for-profit company.
Altman's choice to eschew equity has previously spooked investors, who saw it as a sign that he didn't expect the organization to succeed, he said. At a recent all-team meeting, Altman said he had no plans to take an equity stake in OpenAI as its board considers a for-profit structure, a person in attendance told CNBC in September.
"If I could go back in time, I would have taken [equity], just some little bit, just to never have to answer this question," Altman said at DealBook.
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