As was recently revealed in OpenAI’s tax filing, Sam Altman is not exactly the highest paid CEO in the world. In fact, according to what he himself declared before the United States Congressional Commission (not without some ridicule from one of the congressmen present), Altman earned “the minimum necessary to cover health insurance”: just over $76,000 a year. .
Altman is not the only CEO with a absurdly low salaryIn fact, it is a fairly common tax “trick” among the founders and CEOs of big technology companies. For example, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk earn a symbolic salary of one dollar for their work at the head of their companies, but then receive million-dollar annual bonuses or stock packages that consolidate their power in the companies they run. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Sam Altman either.
As he said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, “This is my childhood dream job. Working and sitting in the room with the smartest researchers in the world and going on this crazy adventure, like that’s what that I always wanted to do.”
The key: working for OpenAI
Beyond being the job that the eight-year-old Altman always dreamed of, one of the reasons for having such a low payroll It is the fact of working in a company classified as a non-profit entity.
A few months ago, Altman revealed on the ‘All in’ podcast that, since OpenAI is a non-profit company, with a commercial arm that is for-profit, it needed a board of directors with a certain number of “disinterested” members.
For this reason, after the dantesque spectacle that the board of directors of OpenAI gave with the dismissal and subsequent reinstatement of Sam Altman, its founder rejected any participation in its shareholding, to maintain the quota of “altruistic” directors within the governing body. However, Altman has claimed to be very comfortable in this situation, “I think it should at least be understandable that this is worth more to me than any additional money,” he said during his DealBook interview.
As published CNBCOpenAI is valued at $157 billion, so even 1% of those shares would mean a considerable fortune for its founder. However, Altman seems to have his financial needs covered and, in fact, his investments at the head of the startup accelerator Y Combinator They are making him tremendously rich. His current fortune is valued at about $1.1 billion according to Forbes.
The decision not to accept a stake in the capital of OpenAI has raised the suspicions of investors, who find it strange that one of its co-founders and member of the board of directors has nothing to lose if OpenAI’s adventure is not successful.
For this reason, the rest of the board of directors is insisting on offering Sam Altman a 7% share in the future reconversion of OpenAI to a full for-profit company, as reported Reuters. “If I could go back in time, I would have taken (the capital), even a little, just so I would never have to answer this question,” Altman said in his speech in DealBook.
In WorldOfSoftware | The average annual salary earned by employees of the “magnificent seven” of technology, explained in a graph
Imagen | Flickr (TechCrunch)
