OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is poised to amass substantial wealth following Reddit's public listing, a result of strategic investments in the online discussion board dating back to 2014.
Altman holds a 9.2% voting power stake in Reddit as it prepares for its initial public offering, as revealed in the company's prospectus.
Altman, who is reportedly focused on raising funds for chip development to support Microsoft-backed OpenAI's artificial intelligence computing demand, has a history of investments in various startups, such as Asana and Instacart.
Prior to his role at OpenAI, Altman served as the president of Y Combinator, providing exposure to numerous small companies.
In 2014, Altman led a $50 million Series B funding round for Reddit, expressing his deep connection to the platform where he had been an active user for nine years.
His subsequent investments, including $50 million in the first half of 2021 and an additional $10 million later that year, have proven lucrative, with the value of his initial investment increasing by 45%.
Altman, who served on Reddit's board until 2021, is now focused on expanding the adoption of OpenAI's services, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot. Reddit, in its filing, acknowledges competition from large language models like Google's Gemini, Anthropic, and ChatGPT.
As part of its IPO, Reddit plans to offer shares to users and moderators (Redditors), a move Altman supports to enhance community ownership.
Altman has long advocated for users to have a stake in platforms like Reddit, as evidenced by his commitment to allocating 10% of shares to Reddit users during the Series B funding round in 2014.
Paraphrasing text from "Investing" all rights reserved by the original author.
