Meet Sam Altman’s Parents: Connie Gibstine and Jerry Altman

Sam Altman, born Samuel Harris Altman, is the OpenAI CEO who has become one of the most recognizable faces in the global artificial intelligence industry, and he was raised by two parents whose careers sat far outside the tech world that would later define his life.

His mother, Connie Gibstine, built a decades-long career in medicine, while his father, Jerry Altman, worked in real estate and community development in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sam Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, Illinois, and is 41 years old. He was raised in a Jewish American family and spent most of his childhood in the St. Louis suburb of Ladue after his family relocated from Chicago.

He is the eldest of four children born to Connie and Jerry, with two younger brothers, Jack Altman and Max Altman, and a younger sister, Annie Altman. Altman attended John Burroughs School, a private preparatory school in St. Louis, before studying computer science at Stanford University, from which he left without graduating to pursue his first startup, Loopt.

Altman stands at 173 cm (5 feet 8 inches) tall. He is publicly known to be gay and has spoken openly about his sexuality in past interviews and personal writing. He married his longtime partner, Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, in January 2024, marking his first and only marriage.

The couple welcomed their first child in early 2025 via surrogate. Altman’s net worth is $2 billion to $4 billion, built primarily through early-stage venture investments in companies such as Stripe, Airbnb, and Reddit rather than through equity in OpenAI itself, in which he holds no direct ownership stake.

Connie Gibstine

Connie Gibstine is 41-year-old Sam Altman’s mother. She has practiced for more than three decades as a board-certified dermatologist at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in St. Louis.

She earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana before obtaining her medical degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, and she completed her residency at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

Connie married Jerry Altman in 1977, and the couple began their married life in Chicago, where Sam was born, before relocating to suburban St. Louis around 1987.

Described by those close to the family as a warm and encouraging presence, Connie is widely credited with nurturing her eldest son’s early fascination with computers. She reportedly bought Sam his first Macintosh computer when he was eight years old, an event he later described as life-changing.

Connie remains a practicing dermatologist and continues to be actively involved in her son’s life. She has attended major milestones tied to his career, including OpenAI’s public launch, and has spoken publicly about the closeness and complexity of her children’s relationships with one another as adults.

Jerry Altman

Jerry Altman was Sam Altman’s father. He worked as a real estate broker in St. Louis and, according to his daughter Annie, remained involved in affordable housing and historic preservation efforts in the city up until his death.

Jerry died unexpectedly from a heart attack in May 2018, a loss that deeply affected Sam. Sam has since spoken candidly about the experience. He once compared the shock of his father’s sudden death to the shock of being briefly ousted from OpenAI in 2023, though he described losing his father as by far the harder of the two events to process.

He has recounted having to manage the practical aftermath of his father’s affairs in the immediate weeks that followed, describing a period where the full weight of the loss only settled in once those responsibilities were handled.

Despite the limited public documentation of his career compared to Connie’s, Jerry Altman was remembered by his children as an integral part of a tightly knit household, one built around nightly family dinners and shared games that included table tennis, billiards, and charades.

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