The CEO of payments company Klarna has warned that AI could lead to job cuts and a recession.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he believed AI would increasingly replace white-collar jobs.
Klarna previously said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents.
The CEO of the Swedish payments company Klarna says that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to a recession as the technology replaces white-collar jobs.
Speaking on The Times Tech podcast, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there would be "an implication for white-collar jobs," which he said "usually leads to at least a recession in the short term."
"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he continued.
Siemiatkowski, who has long been candid about his belief that AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that the firm's workforce had shrunk from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result.
It's not the first time the exec and Klarna have made headlines along these lines.
In February 2024, Klarna boasted that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The company, most famous for its "buy now, pay later" service, was one of the first firms to partner with Sam Altman's company.
Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed AI was already capable of doing "all of the jobs" that humans do and that Klarna had enacted a hiring freeze since 2023 as it looked to slim down and focus on adopting the technology.
However, Siemiatkowski has since dialed back his all-in stance on AI, telling an audience at the firm's Stockholm headquarters in May that his AI-driven customer service cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to now recruit, according to Bloomberg.
"From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want," he said.
In the interview with The Times, Siemiatkowski said he felt that many people in the tech industry, particularly CEOs, tended to "downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular."
"I don't want to be one of them," he said. "I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations."
Some of the top leaders in AI, however, have been ringing the alarm lately, too.
Anthropic's leadership has been particularly outspoken about the threat AI poses to the human labor market.
The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. "I don't think this is on people's radar."
Similarly, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said he is hesitant to hire entry-level software engineers over more experienced ones who can also leverage AI tools.
The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of better and more fulfilling work, Krieger said.
Humans, he said, should focus on "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that's probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced."
As new questions arise about how AI will communicate with humans — and with other AI — new protocols are emerging.
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AI protocols are evolving to address interactions between humans and AI, and among AI systems.
New AI protocols aim to manage non-deterministic behavior, crucial for future AI integration.
"I think we will see a lot of new protocols in the age of AI," an executive at World told BI.
The tech industry, much like everything else in the world, abides by certain rules.
With the boom in personal computing came USB, a standard for transferring data between devices. With the rise of the internet came IP addresses, numerical labels that identify every device online. With the advent of email came SMTP, a framework for routing email across the internet.
These are protocols — the invisible scaffolding of the digital realm — and with every technological shift, new ones emerge to govern how things communicate, interact, and operate.
As the world enters an era shaped by AI, it will need to draw up new ones. But AI goes beyond the usual parameters of screens and code. It forces developers to rethink fundamental questions about how technological systems interact across the virtual and physical worlds.
How will humans and AI coexist? How will AI systems engage with each other? And how will we define the protocols that manage a new age of intelligent systems?
Across the industry, startups and tech giants alike are busy developing protocols to answer these questions. Some govern the present in which humans still largely control AI models. Others are building for a future in which AI has taken over a significant share of human labor.
"Protocols are going to be this kind of standardized way of processing non-deterministic information," Antoni Gmitruk, the chief technology officer of Golf, which helps clients deploy remote servers aligned with Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, told BI. Agents, and AI in general, are "inherently non-deterministic in terms of what they do and how they behave."
When AI behavior is difficult to predict, the best response is to imagine possibilities and test them through hypothetical scenarios.
Here are a few that call for clear protocols.
Scenario 1: Humans and AI, a dialogue of equals
Games are one way to determine which protocols strike the right balance of power between AI and humans.
In late 2024, a group of young cryptography experts launched Freysa, an AI agent that invites human users to manipulate it. The rules are unconventional: Make Freysa fall in love with you or agree to concede its funds, and the prize is yours. The prize pool grows with each failed attempt in a standoff between human intuition and machine logic.
Freysa has caught the attention of big names in the tech industry, from Elon Musk, who called one of its games "interesting," to veteran venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
"The core technical thing we've done is enabled her to have her own private keys inside a trusted enclave," said one of the architects of Freysa, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to BI in a January interview.
Secure enclaves are not new in the tech industry. They're used by companies from AWS to Microsoft as an extra layer of security to isolate sensitive data.
In Freysa's case, the architect said they represent the first step toward creating a "sovereign agent." He defined that as an agent that can control its own private keys, access money, and evolve autonomously — the type of agent that will likely become ubiquitous.
"Why are we doing it at this time? We're entering a phase where AI is getting just good enough that you can see the future, which is AI basically replacing your work, my work, all our work, and becoming economically productive as autonomous entities," the architect said.
In this phase, they said Freysa helps answer a core question: "What does human involvement look like? And how do you have human co-governance over agents at scale?"
In May, the The Block, a crypto news site, revealed that the company behind Freysa is Eternis AI. Eternis AI describes itself as an "applied AI lab focused on enabling digital twins for everyone, multi-agent coordination, and sovereign agent systems." The company has raised $30 million from investors, including Coinbase Ventures. Its co-founders are Srikar Varadaraj, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Ken Li, and Augustinas Malinauskas.
Scenario 2: To the current architects of intelligence
Freysa establishes protocols in anticipation of a hypothetical future when humans and AI agents interact with similar levels of autonomy. The world, however, needs also to set rules for the present, where AI still remains a product of human design and intention.
AI typically runs on the web and builds on existing protocols developed long before it, explained Davi Ottenheimer, a cybersecurity strategistwho studies the intersection of technology, ethics, and human behavior, and is president of security consultancy flyingpenguin. "But it adds in this new element of intelligence, which is reasoning," he said, and we don't yet have protocols for reasoning.
"I'm seeing this sort of hinted at in all of the news. Oh, they scanned every book that's ever been written and never asked if they could. Well, there was no protocol that said you can't scan that, right?" he said.
There might not be protocols, but there are laws.
OpenAI is facing a copyright lawsuit from the Authors Guild for training its models on data from "more than 100,000 published books" and then deleting the datasets. Meta considered buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster outright to gain access to published books. Tech giants have also resorted to tapping almost all of the consumer data available online from the content of public Google Docs and the relics of social media sites like Myspace and Friendster to train their AI models.
Ottenheimer compared the current dash for data to the creation of ImageNet — the visual database that propelled computer vision, built by Mechanical Turk workers who scoured the internet for content.
"They did a bunch of stuff that a protocol would have eliminated," he said.
Scenario 3: How to take to each other
As we move closer to a future where artificial general intelligence is a reality, we'll need protocols for how intelligent systems — from foundation models to agents — communicate with each other and the broader world.
The leading AI companies have already launched new ones to pave the way. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, in November 2024. It describes it as a "universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol."
In April, Google launched Agent2Agent, a protocol that will "allow AI agents to communicate with each other, securely exchange information, and coordinate actions on top of various enterprise platforms or applications."
These build on existing AI protocols, but address new challenges of scaling and interoperability that have become critical to AI adoption.
So, managing agents' behavior is the "middle step before we unleash the full power of AGI and let them run around the world freely," he said. When we arrive at that point, Gmitruksaid agents will no longer communicate through APIs but in natural language. They'll have unique identities, jobs even, and need to be verified.
"How do we enable agents to communicate between each other, and not just being computer programs running somewhere on the server, but actually being some sort of existing entity that has its history, that has its kind of goals," Gmitruk said.
It's still early to set standards for agent-to-agent communication, Gmitruk said. Earlier this year he and his team initially launched a company focused on building an authentication protocol for agents, but pivoted.
"It was too early for agent-to-agent authentication," he told BI over LinkedIn. "Our overall vision is still the same -> there needs to be agent-native access to the conventional internet, but we just doubled down on MCP as this is more relevant at the stage of agents we're at."
Does everything need a protocol?
Definitely not. The AI boom marks a turning point, reviving debates over how knowledge is shared and monetized.
McKinsey & Company calls it an "inflection point" in the fourth industrial revolution — a wave of change that it says began in the mid-2010s and spans the current era of "connectivity, advanced analytics, automation, and advanced-manufacturing technology."
Moments like this raise a key question: How much innovation belongs to the public and how much to the market? Nowhere is that clearer than in the AI world's debate between the value of open-source and closed models.
"I think we will see a lot of new protocols in the age of AI," Tiago Sada, the chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, the company building the technology behind Sam Altman's World. However, "I don't think everything should be a protocol."
World is a protocol designed for a future in which humans will need to verify their identity at every turn. Sada said the goal of any protocol "should be like this open thing, like this open infrastructure that anyone can use," and is free from censorship or influence.
At the same time, "one of the downsides of protocols is that they're sometimes slower to move," he said. "When's the last time email got a new feature? Or the internet? Protocols are open and inclusive, but they can be harder to monetize and innovate on," he said. "So in AI, yes — we'll see some things built as protocols, but a lot will still just be products."
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
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Before OpenAI, Altman was well-known in Silicon Valley as the president of Y Combinator.
The release of ChatGPT in 2022 catapulted Altman to worldwide fame.
Since then, he's led the charge to make OpenAI the first company to unleash the power of AGI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had an eventful 2024, and 2025 is shaping up to be just as big.
While the 39-year-old entrepreneur has been a household name in Silicon Valley for years now, the rest of the world has gotten to know him more recently through the success of OpenAI's AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which launched in 2022.
So far this year, Altman has tried to transform OpenAI into a for-profit company before backtracking in light of a lawsuit filed by OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk, while releasing the company's first "emotionally intelligent" model GPT-4.5, and planning for GPT-5.
Altman also unveiled a new partnership with longtime Apple designer Jony Ive, who, with his design firm LoveFrom, will take creative and design control of OpenAI. OpenAI is also acquiring Ive's hardware startup in a $6.5 billion deal.
This year also marked major milestones in Altman's personal life. Altman, who's married to Oliver Mulherin, announced the birth of his son in February.
In April 2024, Altman was added to Forbes' billionaires list. OpenAI launched GPT-4o — its newest large language model —the following month. In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference that the tech giant would partner with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to iPhones.
Before the AI boom, Altman spent years as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. He also owns stakes in Reddit, a nuclear fusion startup known as Helion, and other companies. In his free time, he races sports cars with his husband and preps for the apocalypse.
Here's a look at Altman's life and career so far.
Altman grew up in St. Louis and he was a computer whiz from a young age.
Sam Altman is a Missouri native.
f11photo/Shutterstock
He learned how to program and take apart a Macintosh computer when he was 8 years old, according to The New Yorker. He attended John Burroughs School, a private, nonsectarian college-preparatory school in St. Louis.
Altman told The New Yorker that having a Mac helped him with his sexuality
Altman has been open about his sexuality since he was a teenager.
Matt Weinberger/Business Insider
"Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing," he told The New Yorker. "And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you're eleven or twelve."
Altman came out as gay after a Christian group boycotted an assembly at his school that was about sexuality.
"What Sam did changed the school," his college counselor, Madelyn Gray, told The New Yorker. "It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world."
Altman studied computer science at Stanford University before dropping out to start an app
Like many famous tech founders, Altman is a college dropout.
turtix/Shutterstock
The app shared a user's location with their friends. Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Each startup got $6,000 per founder, and Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit, according to The Business of Business.
Loopt eventually reached a $175 million valuation
Altman has been a tech founder since his early 20s.
Drew Angerer/Getty
The $43 million sale price was close to how much it had raised from investors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company was acquired by Green Dot, a banking company known for prepaid cards.
One of Loopt's cofounders, Nick Sivo, and Altman dated for nine years, but they broke up after they sold the company.
After Loopt, Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21 million.
Peter Thiel has backed multiple companies founded by Altman.
Marco Bello/Getty Images
That included a large part of the $5 million he got from Loopt, and an investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75% of that money into YC companies and led Reddit's Series B fundraising round.
He told The New Yorker, "You want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts, the company will be hugely underpriced."
In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the startup accelerator.
Altman was a teacher and a major player in the startup world in 2014.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
While he was YC president, Altman taught a lecture series at Stanford called "How to Start a Startup." The next year, at 29, Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital.
After he became YC president, he wanted to let more science and engineering startups into each batch.
Altman at the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Idaho in 2016.
Drew Angerer/Getty
He chose a fission and a fusion startup for YC because he wanted to start a nuclear-energy company of his own. He invested his own money in both companies and served on their boards.
Mark Andreessen, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told The New Yorker, "Under Sam, the level of YC's ambition has gone up 10x."
He finds interesting — and expensive — ways to spend his free time.
The Koenigsegg Regera is a rare Swedish sports car that can cost nearly $5 million.
Martyn Lucy/Getty Images
In April (the same month he made Forbes' billionaire list), Altman was spotted in Napa, California, driving an ultra-rare Swedish supercar. The Koenigsegg Regera is seriously fast, able to go from zero to 250 miles per hour in less than 30 seconds. Only 80 of these cars are known to exist, and they can cost up to $4.65 million.
He once told two YC founders that he likes racing cars and had five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla, according to The New Yorker. He's said he likes racing cars and renting planes to fly all over California.
Separately, he told the founders of the startup Shypmate that, "I prep for survival," and warned of either a "lethal synthetic virus," AI attacking humans, or nuclear war.
"I try not to think about it too much," Altman told the founders in 2016. "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."
Altman's mom is a dermatologist and told The New Yorker, "Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He'll call and say he has a headache — and he'll have Googled it, so there's some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn't have meningitis or lymphoma, that it's just stress."
Altman has a brother, Jack, who is a cofounder and CEO at Lattice, an employee management platform.
Julia and Jack Altman live in the Mission District of San Francisco.
San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images/Contributor
Along with their brother Max, the Altmans launched a fund in 2020 called Apollo that is focused on funding "moonshot" companies. They're startups that are financially risky but could potentially pay off with a breakthrough development.
In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX at the time.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage in San Francisco.
"We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?" Musk told The New York Times in 2015. "We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity."
Some of Silicon Valley's most prominent names pledged $1 billion to OpenAI, including Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, and Thiel.
Altman stepped down as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He stayed in a chairman role at the accelerator.
Altman went all in on OpenAI in 2019.
@sama
At a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the "honest answer is we have no idea."
Altman said OpenAI had "never made any revenue" and that it had "no current plans to make revenue."
"We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said at the time, according to TechCrunch.
Altman became CEO of OpenAI in May 2019 after it turned away from being a nonprofit company into a "capped profit" corporation.
OpenAI changed from nonprofit status in 2019.
Skye Gould/Business Insider
"We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance," OpenAI said on its blog. "Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit — which we are calling a 'capped-profit' company."
OpenAI received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.
Altman in 2014 in New York City.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Altman flew to Seattle to meet with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, where he demonstrated OpenAI's AI models for him, The Wall Street Journal reported. The pair announced their business partnership on LinkedIn.
Current and former insiders at OpenAI told Fortune that after Altman took over as CEO, and after the investment from Microsoft, the company started focusing more on developing natural language processing.
The company shifted its focus after Altman took over.
Brian Ach/Getty
Altman and OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, said the move to focus on large language models was the best way for the company to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a system that has broad human-level cognitive abilities.
In 2021, Altman and cofounders Alex Blania and Max Novendstern launched a global cryptocurrency project called Worldcoin.
Worldcoin founders Alex Blania and Sam Altman.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc/Worldcoin
The company, now just called World, aims to give everyone in the world access to crypto by scanning their iris with an orb. In January, World said it had reached 1 million people and has onboarded over 150,000 first-time crypto users.
Under Altman's tenure as CEO, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT.
A screenshot of a Dall-E webpage.
OpenAI
Both DALL-E and ChatGPT are known as "generative" AI, meaning the bot creates its own artwork and text based on information it is fed.
After ChatGPT was released on November 30, Altman tweeted that it had reached over 1 million users in five days.
ChatGPT was made public so OpenAI could use feedback from users to improve the bot.
ChatGPT's success was nearly instant.
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A few days after its launch, Altman said that it "is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness." Altman posted that ChatGPT was "great" for "fun creative inspiration," but "not such a good idea" to look up facts.
ChatGPT then launched a paid version of ChatGPT called "ChatGPT Professional" to give better access to the bot. In December, Altman posted that OpenAI "will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering."
In January 2023, Microsoft announced it was making another "multibillion-dollar" investment in OpenAI.
OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft further solidified its success.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The value of Microsoft's investment was worth $10 billion. Before Microsoft's investment, other venture capitalists wanted to buy shares from OpenAI employees in a tender offer that valued the company at around $29 billion.
Altman is still interested in nuclear fusion and invested $375 million in Helion Energy in 2022.
Altman said he's "super excited" about Helion's future.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
"Helion is more than an investment to me," Altman told TechCrunch. "It's the other thing beside OpenAI that I spend a lot of time on. I'm just super excited about what's going to happen there."
He told TechCrunch that he's "happy there's a fusion race," to build a low-cost fusion energy system that can eventually power the Earth.
OpenAI launched its subscription plan for ChatGPT Plus in 2023.
Users can pay for more features on ChatGPT.
FLORENCE LO/Reuters
People who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus get benefits such as access to the app even when traffic is high, faster responses from the bot, and first access to new features and ChatGPT improvements.
Altman wrote that OpenAI's mission is to make sure AGI "benefits all of humanity."
Artificial general intelligence is a big talking point for Altman.
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
"If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility," Altman wrote on OpenAI's blog.
Despite its potential, Altman said artificial general intelligence comes with "serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption." But instead of stopping its development, Altman said "society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."
Altman went on to share the principles that OpenAI "care about most," including "the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared."
Altman said he and OpenAI are "a little bit scared" of AI's potential.
GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4) is a multimodal large language model from Open AI, a predecessor to GPT-4o.
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In an interview with ABC News, Altman said he thinks "people should be happy that we're a little bit scared" of generative AI systems as they develop.
Altman said he doesn't think AI systems should only be developed in a lab.
"You've got to get these products out into the world and make contact with reality, make our mistakes while the stakes are low," he said.
In April 2023, OpenAI announced the option to turn off chat history in ChatGPT.
Over the years, people have expressed concerns about the privacy policies of AI chatbots.
Getty
In a blog post, the company said it hoped the option to turn off chat history "provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process."
When a user turns off their chat history, new conversations will be kept for 30 days for OpenAI to review them for abuse, then are permanently deleted.
In his first appearance before Congress, Altman told a Senate panel there should be a government agency to grant licenses to companies working on advanced AI.
Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law in 2023.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Altman told lawmakers there should be an agency that grants licenses for companies that are working on AI models "above a certain scale of capabilities." He also said the agency should be able to revoke licenses from companies that don't follow safety rules.
"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," Altman said. "And we want to be vocal about that, we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening."
OpenAI launched a ChatGPT app for iPhones and Android users in 2023.
OpenAI released its official ChatGPT app to iPhone users.
Insider
The app, which is free, can answer text-based and spoken questions using Whisper, another OpenAI product that is a speech-recognition model. Users who have a subscription to ChatGPT Plus can also access it through the app.
Altman met with leaders in Europe to discuss AI regulations and said OpenAI has "no plans to leave" the EU.
Altman believes AI could surpass humanity in most domains in the next 10 years.
Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters.
At the start of his trip, Altman told reporters in London that he was concerned about the EU's proposed AI Act, which focuses on regulating AI and protecting Europeans from AI risks.
"The details really matter," Altman said, according to the Financial Times. "We will try to comply, but if we can't comply, we will cease operating."
However, he shared on X later in the week that OpenAI is "excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave."
In an October 2023 interview, Altman expressed "deep misgivings" about people befriending AI.
Altman has been vocal about his stance on AI's place in the future.
"I personally really have deep misgivings about this vision of the future where everyone is super close to AI friends, and not more so with their human friends," Altman said.
OpenAI shocked tech fans by announcing that Altman would no longer be the company's CEO.
Altman and CTO Mira Murati, who briefly took over as interim CEO after his ousting.
PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
In November, the OpenAI board of directors announced that Altman would be stepping down from his role as CEO and leaving the board, "effective immediately."
In a blog post, the board said it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," and added that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications."
"We are grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," a statement from OpenAI's board says. "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."
Altman issued his own statement via a post on X.
"i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people," Altman wrote.
He added: "will have more to say about what's next later."
Days after the ouster, Altman returned as CEO.
Altman returned to OpenAI days after his dismissal was announced.
"We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo," the company wrote on X.
In January 2024, Altman confirmed he had married his partner Oliver Mulherin.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (R) with his husband Oliver Mulherin (L) at a White House dinner.
An attendee of the wedding confirmed to Business Insider that the pictures the couple shared weren't AI-generated. His husband is an Australian software engineer who previously worked at Meta, according to his LinkedIn profile.
OpenAI launched its text-to-video model Sora.
Sora is still being tested, but OpenAI and Sam Altman are showing off what it can do.
OpenAI
In February 2024, OpenAI unveiled Sora to the public. The program — named after the Japanese word for "sky" — created up to one-minute-long videos from text prompts.
"We're teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction," OpenAI wrote in Sora's announcement.
Altman and his husband signed the Giving Pledge in 2024.
Sam Altman and Oliver Mulherin have pledged to give away most of their wealth.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Time
A few weeks after Forbes declared Altman a billionaire, he and his partner signed the Giving Pledge, vowing to give away most of their fortune.
"We would not be making this pledge if it weren't for the hard work, brilliance, generosity, and dedication to improve the world of many people that built the scaffolding of society that let us get here," the pledge letter read.
They continued: "There is nothing we can do except feel immense gratitude and commit to pay it forward, and do what we can to build the scaffolding up a little higher."
OpenAI introduces GPT-4o.
OpenAI's CTO was the main speaker at the Spring Update in May.
OpenAI
During its "Spring Update" on May 13, 2024, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, an updated version of its large language model that powers ChatGPT. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati made the announcement, and Altman didn't make an appearance despite actively promoting the event on X.
Altman might've been absent from the presentation, but the demonstrations of ChatGPT's voice and video capabilities created buzz online. It also led to Altman and his company being called out by actor Scarlett Johansson, who alleged that the OpenAI chatbot Sky's voice sounded "eerily similar" to her own after she declined a partnership.
Altman's post on X referencing a movie in which Johansson voices someone's virtual girlfriend was quickly called into question, and the company soon said that it would not move forward with the voice heard in the demo.
Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
OpenAI's Sam Altman and Apple's Tim Cook announced a deal at WWDC 2024.
Getty Images
After much debate about how it would enter the AI arms race, Apple announced at WWDC 2024 that it would partner with OpenAI to close the gap between it and its rivals.
Although Bloomberg reported that Apple isn't paying OpenAI in cash, the tech titan's solid installed base of over two billion users means more people may use ChatGPT if it comes integrated with Siri. According to the presentation, Siri will be able to handle more complex requests with help from ChatGPT.
Altman was spotted attending WWDC the day the partnership was announced and speaking to high-ranking Apple employees ahead of the keynote.
Altman might finally get equity as OpenAI considers restructuring.
Sam Altman
Riddhi Kanetkar / Business Insider
Altman confirmed reports that OpenAI was planning a corporate restructuring during a talk at Italian Tech Week in September 2024.
"Our board has been thinking about that for almost a year, independently, as we think about what it takes to get to our next stage," Altman said. "I think this is just about people being ready for new chapters of their lives and a new generation of leadership."
As part of those changes, Altman might finally get equity in OpenAI, which is now worth about $157 billion after it closed its most recent, $6.6 billion funding round.
In October 2024, Altman weighed in on how close he is to achieving OpenAI's mission.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
At OpenAI's developer conference, Dev Day, Altman said o1, OpenAI's latest set of AI models, which it says has "reasoning" abilities, represented a breakthrough toward artificial general intelligence.
While Altman said he believes AGI — a still hypothetical form of AI that can solve any task a human can — is still a ways away, there will be "very steep" progress over the next two years.
OpenAI announced in January that it'd be involved in a $500 billion project called Stargate.
President Donald Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison at the Stargate press conference.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
On January 21, Altman joined Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, President Donald Trump, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son to announce a partnership to fund a $500 billion investment in US AI. The companies would form Stargate, a project that seeks to build US AI infrastructure and create jobs.
"Together these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate," Trump said, adding: "Put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about it."
He declined a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI from a group led by Elon Musk.
Musk and Altman have had a rocky relationship since he left OpenAI.
Steve Granitz, Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images
Though the pair founded OpenAI together, Altman's relationship with Musk has become increasingly tense over the years. Musk offered to run OpenAI, but his proposal was rejected, Semafor reported in 2023. He departed OpenAI in 2018 and went on to start xAI.
Since then, they've had heated exchanges, shared words of appreciation, and entered a legal battle. Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in March 2024, alleging the company violated its founding principles.
In an August 2024 lawsuit, Musk claimed he was "deceived" into cofounding OpenAI.
The most recent development in their feud is a $97.4 billion bid to buy the AI company by a group led by Musk. Altman declined, telling Sky News reporters at an AI summit in Paris, "The company is not for sale, neither is the mission."
He announced the birth of his first child in February.
welcome to the world, little guy!
he came early and is going to be in the nicu for awhile. he is doing well and it’s really nice to be in a little bubble taking care of him.
On February 22, Altman announced the birth of his son on social media. Altman said the newborn will be in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, which offers medical treatment after birth, "for awhile."
"i have never felt such love," Altman said in his post.
Days later, OpenAI released GPT-4.5.
Sam Altman posted a roadmap for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 on X.
JOEL SAGET / AFP
Altman introduced the new model in a post on X, where he described it as "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person." He added that the model will be "giant" and "expensive," and Altman said it offers a "different kind of intelligence and there's a magic to it."
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 to pro tier users who pay $200 a month and developers in the API with plans to offer it to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Edu users the following week.
OpenAI backtracks on its plans to go for-profit
In a blog post on May 5, OpenAI said it "was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit."
It added that the"for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)—a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."
OpenAI also said that the nonprofit will continue to control the PBC and remain its largest shareholder. The new PBC will maintain OpenAI's same mission.
OpenAI acquires the startup io from ex-Apple designer Jony Ive in a $6.5 billion deal.
Jony Ive and Sam Altman.
LoveFrom
Altman announced on May 21 that OpenAI was buying a hardware startup called io from Jony Ive, the former Apple exec who led the design of the iPhone and other iconic products. The deal is valued at nearly $6.5 billion, a spokesperson confirmed to BI.
Altman also noted that Ive, and his design firm LoveFrom, would be taking control of creative and design at OpenAI — a partnership that has been two years in the making.
Iron Dome is one layer of Israel's advanced and highly tested air defenses.
MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images
Israel has one of the world's most advanced air defense systems.
Its air defenses are being tested amid its war against Hamas and Iran's retaliatory attacks.
President Donald Trump said his plan for a "Golden Dome" was inspired by Israel's missile defenses.
Israel touts one of the most advanced air defenses in the world,systems that have defended Israeli troops and citizens from rocket and missile barrages for over a decade.
These layers of air defenses are essential to Israel's security and include the legendary Iron Dome that downs incoming rockets. Much of its population is within reach of rockets and missiles fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the ballistic missiles fired by Yemen's Houthis.
After his return to the White House in January, President Donald Trump proposed a next-generation missile shield inspired by the Israeli missile defense systems — but on a vast scale.
Aptly named the "Golden Dome," the president said the ambitious weapons and sensory system to intercept threats like nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles will cost about $175 billion, with plans to field it by the end of his presidential term, though it could take longer to fully construct.
The system is so vast and its components so new that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated it could cost between $160 billion and $830 billion.
Golden Dome
The proposed "Golden Dome" system could cost between $160 billion and $830 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Earlier this week, Trump detailed his plans to build the "Golden Dome," previously known as the "Iron Dome for America," as defense contractors and tech companies already line up to be considered for development.
"We'll have it done in three years," Trump told reporters at the White House on May 21. "Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world."
While Israel's air defense network is considered one of the most advanced aerial defense systems in the world, the missile shield is responsible for defending a country roughly the size of the state of New Jersey — the second smallest US state — from short-range threats.
Trump aims to make the Golden Dome a space-based missile system to defend the US — about the size of continental Europe — against advanced ballistic and hypersonic missile threats from the world's most powerful countries. Russia has an estimated 4,300 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, each of which a system like Golden Dome must be capable of defeating, necessitating an even larger number of intercept missiles and other weapons.
"I think that this year, we're going to see a different national conversation about space," Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider.
US foreign aid to Israel
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid, receiving about $300 billion in economic and foreign aid for nearly eight decades.
Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images
About 15% of Israel's defense budget comes from the US. Since its founding in 1948, the US has sent Israel about $300 billion in economic and military aid, making it the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid.
Nearly all of the aid the US has sent in recent months has been allocated to its advanced defense systems and military equipment. But America's involvement in Israel's war in the Gaza Strip has grown controversial. The US is providing limited humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza while also providing military support and weapons to Israel.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have died since October 7, 2023, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Iron Dome
Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system fires interceptors at rockets launched from the Gaza Strip.
Tsafrir Abayov/AP
The most well-known of Israel's air defense systems, the Iron Dome, consists of a network of radar detectors and missile launchers used to intercept enemy fire, including short-range rockets and artillery.
Deployed in southern Israel in 2011 following the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the US helped and funded the development of the short-range rocket defense system. It contributed at least $1.6 billion to the Iron Dome system from 2011 to 2021, as well as another $1 billion in 2022.
The first layer of defense
The multi-mission defense system can shoot down enemy rockets and artillery up to 43.5 miles away.
REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The Israel Defense Forces said the objective of the Iron Dome is to "protect Israeli civilians from the constant threat of rockets by intercepting them." The IDF described the Iron Dome with three adjectives: "accuracy, speed, and capacity."
Armed with Tamir interceptor missiles, the multi-mission defense system can shoot down enemy rockets and artillery up to 43.5 miles away. The advanced missile system has a radar station that detects and tracks the course of enemy rockets before launching a missile to intercept them. The missiles track their target with electro-optical sensors and detonate in the air when close.
While the Iron Dome doesn't have a perfect interception record, it has blocked a majority of enemy fire in Israeli airspace, especially at times of intense barrages from Hamas militants.
Missiles have a much longer range than shells, but they also have the disadvantage of being expensive. The Tamir missiles fired by Iron Dome are estimated to each cost around $50,000.
David's Sling
The David's Sling missile defense system carries up to 12 interceptors.
Ministry of Defense via AP, File
The middle layer of Israel's Iron Dome defense system is David's Sling, a medium- to long-range air defense system designed to intercept missiles as far as 185 miles away.
Also known as the Magic Wand, the versatile missile system carries up to 12 interceptors. Its command and control center, known as the Golden Almond, provides threat assessment and plans and controls interception, complemented by the system's multi-mission radar used to detect and track airborne threats.
The middle layer of defense
The David's Sling is capable of intercepting large-caliber rockets, short-range ballistic missiles, and other types of enemy fire.
Leah Garton/DVIDS
Developed in collaboration with the US and Israel, David's Sling is "a central factor in Israel's multi-tiered defense array," according to Israel's Ministry of Defense. It supports other layers of its air defense system by "tackling large-caliber rockets, short-range ballistic missiles," and other types of enemy fire.
Arrow Weapon System
The Arrow-3 Interceptor missile makes up the top layer of the Iron Dome.
US Missile Defense Agency
The top layer of Israel's sophisticated air defense system is Arrow-3, which is capable of engaging targets at longer ranges and higher altitudes and more precisely intercepting ballistic missiles.
Arrow-3 interceptor operates with the Arrow Weapon System, the world's first operational, national, stand-alone anti-tactical ballistic missile defense system, according to Israel Aerospace Industries, the primary contractor for the AWS. The system was developed in partnership with Boeing and with significant funding from the United States.
Arrow-3 works in conjunction with its predecessor, Arrow-2, to intercept ballistic missiles and other warheads using a two-stage interceptor.
Arrow-3
The first operational use of the Arrow 3 ballistic missile interceptor took place in November 2023 against an inbound missile launched by Houthi militants in Yemen.
REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Arrow-3's "interceptor is a world-class missile that, together with the Arrow-2, significantly expands the State of Israel's defense capabilities," according to Israel's Ministry of Defense.
In November 2023, Israel confirmed the first operational use of the Arrow-3 to stop an inbound enemy missile launched by Houthi militants from Yemen, marking the first time all three layers of Israel's aerial defense were working simultaneously.
"All of these provide protection in every layer of aerial defense and enable optimal protection of the Israeli home front," the IDF said in a statement at the time.
Countering Iran's retaliatory attacks
Israel has deployed its advanced missile interceptor system against Iran's retaliatory attacks over the last year.
Amir Cohen via Reuters
Last October, Iran attacked Israel with a large barrage of ballistic missiles — a rare direct attack that came after a White House warning to its ally.
The missile attack came after the IDF killed the head of Hezbollah and then launched a "limited" ground offensive against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. At the time, the US adjusted its force posture in the Middle East, stationing a substantial force of warships and fighter aircraft across the region to defend Israel and its bases.
Israel's chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told reporters at the time that Arrow 3 had "proved itself against a significant number of ballistic missiles" fired by Iran.
C-Dome
Israel equipped missile boats with interceptors to act as a maritime Iron Dome.
Israeli Ministry of Defense/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Israel's air defense system isn't just limited to land. The country also has a naval version of its Iron Dome system, mounting it aboard Israeli missile boats.
The naval version of the aerial defense system, known as C-Dome, is deployed aboard Sa'ar 6-class corvettes, four German-made warships ordered for Israel's navy.
In addition to the C-Dome, Sa'ar 6 vessels are also equipped with a 76mm Oto Melara Super Rapid main gun, which is effective against close aerial threats.
Israeli missile boats
The Israeli naval fleet includes 11 other warships and five Dolphin-class submarines.
AnadoluIsraeli Ministry of Defence/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
After two years of development, Israel's military announced Monday that the seaborne defense system was used for the first time to intercept a "suspicious aerial target" that entered Israeli airspace near the city of Eilat, which has been frequently targeted by Houthis in Yemen in support of Hamas.
"Overnight, for the first time ever, an IDF Sa'ar 6-class corvette missile ship successfully intercepted a UAV (uncrewed aerial vehicle) that had approached from the east and had crossed into the area of the Gulf of Eilat," the IDF said.
In addition to the four Sa'ar 6-class corvettes, the Israeli naval fleet includes 11 other warships and five Dolphin-class submarines.
SPYDER
Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems developed the SPYDER as an "all-in-one" surface-to-air missile system.
AP Photo/Joseph Nair
To further bolster its air defenses, Israel is also looking at a new "all-in-one" surface-to-air missile system called SPYDER, manufactured by Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
Israel, in collaboration with Rafael, is testing a new configuration for the weapons system, taking the missile launcher, radar, command and control system, and technology for surveillance and target acquisition, and fitting it to an eight-wheel drive vehicle.
"Developed to address the critical operational needs of the modern battlefield, the SPYDER AiO provides an agile, autonomous, air defense asset, capable of rapid deployment within minutes, in challenging terrains, and with short reaction times," according to a fact sheet from Rafael.
'All-in-one' missile system
SPYDER is designed to carry up to eight canisterised missiles and engage up to four targets at a time.
Joseph Nair/AP
Designed to carry up to eight canisterised missiles, including I-Derby SR, I-Derby ER, and Python-5 SR, it can engage up to four targets at a time, with a maximum range of up to nearly 25 miles and an altitude of 7.4 miles, according to the fact sheet.
In January 2024, Israel's defense ministry announced a successful test run of the new weapons system configuration, which is capable of intercepting drones, aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles, and precision-guided munitions.
Rafael's SPYDER air defense system, in its All-In-One configuration, achieved a direct and effective hit during a recent, first of its kind test with the Israeli Ministry of Defense DDR&D. Watch the live fire test here: [YouTube Link] Another milestone in our commitment to… pic.twitter.com/FvU2iS7t5u
— Rafael Advanced Defense Systems (@RAFAELdefense) January 10, 2024
Editor's note: This article was originally published in April 2024 and has been updated in May 2025.
The Berkshire Hathaway board has voted to replace Warren Buffett with Greg Abel.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy
Warren Buffett said on Saturday he will step down as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway by year's end.
The board has voted to make Greg Abel, now a vice chair at the company, its CEO and president.
Abel is expected to maintain Buffett's existing investment approach.
Hours after Warren Buffett stunned the crowd at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting by announcing that he'd step down at the end of the year, its board voted unanimously for Greg Abel to replace him.
Buffett — who is 94 and has been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for 55 years — will remain as chairman of the board of directors, according to a press release. Greg Abel will become the new CEO and president as of January 1, 2026.
"I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive of the company at year end," Buffett told the audience on Saturday, referring to Abel, one of his top hands.
Abel, 62, has been Berkshire Hathaway's vice chair of non-insurance operations since 2018. He's also chair of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which Buffett hailed as one of the conglomerate's four "jewels" in his annual shareholder letter in 2021, the same year Buffett first tapped Abel as his successor.
While Buffett's approval was a major plus, the company's board of directors was tasked with confirming his successor, and did so on Sunday.
Investors and shareholders expect that Abel will maintain Berkshire Hathaway's investment philosophy. He told shareholders at this weekend's meeting that he would start by maintaining the company's "fortress of a balance sheet," which allows it to make large investments without relying on banks, Barron's reported.
Abel is known, however, for having a more hands-on management style than Buffett.
He was estimated by Forbes to be worth $484 million in 2021. In 2022, he sold his 1% stake in the company's Berkshire Hathaway Energy unit for $870 million.
Abel has risen through the ranks with a persistent focus on energy.
The Canadian native played hockey in his early years and attended the University of Alberta. He graduated in 1984 with a degree in commerce.
He joined PwC after graduation and quickly moved on to a small company called CalEnergy. In 1999, CalEnergy acquired MidAmerican Energy and adopted its name. That same year, Berkshire Hathaway bought a controlling interest in MidAmerican Energy. Abel took over the reins of MidAmerican in 2008 — renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy in 2014 — and helmed it until 2018.
He's also served on the board of several major companies, including Kraft Heinz, and has been affiliated with organizations and institutions like the Mid-Iowa Council Boy Scouts of America, Drake University, American Football Coaches Foundation, and the Horatio Alger Association.
He lives in Des Moines, Iowa. Those who've spotted him at a hockey rink in town, watching his son practice, say he comes across as a "regular guy," the Des Moines Register reported.
Buffett also has a reputation as a folksy and down-to-earth person, living in Omaha, Nebraska.
At Berkshire Hathaway, succession doesn't seem to be just about handing over a job. With the title, Buffett said he's passing down traditions — like writing letters — and a mindset, too.
In Berkshire Hathaway's 2024 annual report, Buffett wrote, "At 94, it won't be long before Greg Abel replaces me as CEO and will be writing the annual letters. Greg shares the Berkshire creed that a 'report' is what a Berkshire CEO annually owes to owners.
"And he also understands that if you start fooling your shareholders, you will soon believe your own baloney and be fooling yourself as well."
The toughest job interviews usually have multiple rounds.
Natee Meepian/Getty Images
Tech giants are known for their challenging interviews.
Google, Meta, and Nvidia top the list of rigorous interviews with multiple rounds and assessments.
But tough questions show up across industries, according to employee reports on Glassdoor.
It's tough to break into high-paying companies.
Google is notorious for having a demanding interview process. Aside from putting job candidates through assessments, preliminary phone calls, and asking them to complete projects, the company also screens candidates through multiple rounds of interviews.
Typical interview questions range from open-ended behavioral ones like "tell me about a time that you went against the status quo" or "what does being 'Googley' mean to you?" to more technical ones.
At Nvidia, the chipmaking darling of the AI boom, candidates must also pass through rigorous rounds of assessments and interviews. "How would you describe __ technology to a non-technical person?" was a question a candidate interviewing for a job as a senior solutions architect shared on the career site Glassdoor last month. The candidate noted that they didn't receive an offer.
Tech giants top Glassdoor's list of the hardest companies to interview with. But tough questions show up across industries — from luxury carmakers like Rolls-Royce, where a candidate said they were asked to define "a single crystal," to Bacardi, where a market manager who cited a difficult interview, and no offer, recalled being asked, "If you were a cocktail what would you be and why?"
The digital PR agency Reboot Online analyzed Glassdoor data to determine which companies have the most challenging job interviews. They focused on "reputable companies" listed in the top 100 of Forbes' World's Best Employers list and examined 313,000 employee reviews on Glassdoor. For each company, they looked at the average interview difficulty rating as reported on Glassdoor.
Here's a list of the top 90 companies that put candidates through the ringer for a job, according to self-reported reviews on Glassdoor.
Bill Gates shares three children with Melinda French Gates, pictured here from left to right, Jennifer Gates Nassar, Rory Gates, and Phoebe Gates.
Jean Catuffe/Getty Images // SAUL LOEB // John Nacion/Variety
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates shares three kids with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
His eldest daughter is a med school graduate and his youngest a startup cofounder.
Here's what we know about the children of one of the world's richest men.
Bill Gates' story is a quintessential example of the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend, the late Paul Allen, in 1975.
Nearly 50 years later, Gates' net worth of almost $108 billion makes him one of the richest and most famous men on Earth, per Forbes. He stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 and has cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Gates Foundation — a venture he formerly ran with his now ex-wife Melinda French Gates, who resigned in May.
Even before founding one of the world's most valuable companies, Gates' life was anything but ordinary. He grew up in a well-off and well-connected family, surrounded by his parents' rarefied personal and professional network. Their circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to "Hard Drive," the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates' parents.)
His father, William Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle and the president of the Washington State Bar Association.
His mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions, including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM enlisting Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.
"My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house," Gates said in the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain."
"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities."
Despite his very public life, his three children with French Gates — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — have largely avoided the spotlight for most of their upbringing.
Like their father, the three Gates children attended Seattle's elite Lakeside School, a private high school that has been recognized for excellence in STEM subjects — and that received a $40 million donation from Bill Gates in 2005 to build its financial aid fund. (Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Lakeside and went on to build Microsoft together.)
As they've gotten older, they've stepped more into the public eye, and more details have emerged about their interests, professions, and family life.
Gates recently said his children will get "less than 1%" of his fortune when he dies. But they may also inherit the family foundation, where most of his money will go.
Here's all we know about Bill Gates' children.
Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Jennifer Gates Nassar
Jennifer Gates and Bill Gates attended the Paris Olympic Games in 2024.
Jean Catuffe/Getty Images
Jennifer Gates Nassar, who goes by Jenn, is the oldest of the Gates children at 28 years old.
In 2018, Gates Nassar received her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford University, where a computer science building was named for her father after he donated $6 million to the project in 1996.
She then attended the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, from which she graduated in May. She's continuing at Mt. Sinai for her residency in pediatric research. During medical school, she also completed a Master's in Public Health at Columbia University — perhaps a natural interest given her parents' extensive philanthropic activity in the space.
"Can't believe we've reached this moment, a little girl's childhood aspiration come true," she wrote on Instagram. "It's been a whirlwind of learning, exams, late nights, tears, discipline, and many moments of self-doubt, but the highs certainly outweighed the lows these past 5 years."
In October 2021, she married Egyptian equestrian Nayel Nassar. In February 2023, reports surfaced that they bought a $51 million New York City penthouse with six bedrooms and a plunge pool. The next month, they welcomed their first child, Leila, and in October, Gates Nassar gave birth to their second daughter, Mia.
"I'm over the moon for you, @jenngatesnassar and @nayelnassar—and overjoyed for our whole family," Bill Gates commented on the Instagram post announcing Mia's birth.
In a 2020 interview with the equestrian lifestyle publication Sidelines, Gates Nassar discussed growing up wealthy.
"I was born into a huge situation of privilege," she said. "I think it's about using those opportunities and learning from them to find things that I'm passionate about and hopefully make the world a little bit of a better place."
She recently posted about visiting Kenya, where she learned about childhood health and development in the country.
Rory John Gates
Rory Gates, the least public of the Gates children, has reportedly infiltrated powerful circles of Washington, D.C.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Rory John Gates, who is in his mid-20s, is Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates' only son and the most private of their children. He maintains private social media accounts, and his sisters and parents rarely post photos of him.
His mother did, however, write an essay about him in 2017. Titled "How I Raised a Feminist Son," she describes as a "great son and a great brother" who "inherited his parents' obsessive love of puzzles."
In 2022, he graduated from the University of Chicago, where, based on a photo posted on Facebook, he appears to have been active in moot court. At the time of his graduation, Jennifer Gates Nassar wrote that he had achieved a double major and master's degree.
Little is publicly known about what the middle Gates child has been up to since he graduated, but a Puck report from last year gave some clues, saying that he is seen as a "rich target for Democratic social-climbers, influence-peddlers, and all variety of money chasers."
Phoebe Gates
Phoebe Gates has a fashion startup and a podcast.
John Nacion/Variety
Phoebe Gates, 22, is the youngest of the Gates children.
After graduating from high school in 2021, she followed her sister to Stanford. She graduated in June after three years with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology. Her mom, Melinda French Gates, delivered the university's commencement address.
In a story that Gates wrote for Nylon about her graduation, she documented the day, including a party she cohosted that featured speeches from her famous parents and a piggyback ride from her boyfriend Arthur Donald — the grandson of Sir Paul McCartney.
She has long shown an interest in fashion, interning at British Vogue and posting on social media from fashion weeks in Copenhagen, New York, and Paris. Sustainability is often a theme of her content, which highlights vintage and secondhand stores and celebrates designers who don't use real leather and fur.
That has culminated in her cofounding Phia, a sustainable fashion tech platform that launched in beta this fall. The site and its browser extension crawl secondhand marketplaces to find specific items in an effort to help shoppers find deals and prevent waste.
"I thought, 'Oh boy, she's going to come and ask,'" Gates said. "I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice, but wondered if it was the right thing to do. Luckily, it never happened."
In 2025, Phoebe also launched a podcast called "The Burnouts" with her former roommate and current cofounder Sofia Kianni.
Gates shares her parents' passion for public health. She's attended the UN General Assembly with her mother and spent time in Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that has received funding from the Gates Foundation.
Like her mother, Gates often publicly discusses issues of gender equality, including in essays for Vogue and Teen Vogue, at philanthropic gatherings, and on social media, where she frequently posts about reproductive rights.
She's given thousands to Democrats and Democratic causes, including to Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic Party of Montana, per data from OpenSecrets. According to Puck, she receives a "giving allowance" that makes it possible for her to cut the checks.
Perhaps the most public of the Gates children — she's got over 450,000 Instagram followers and a partnership with Tiffany & Co. — she's given glimpses into their upbringing, including strict rules around technology. The siblings were not allowed to use their phones before bed, she told Bustle, and to get around the rule, she created a cardboard decoy.
"I thought I could dupe my dad, and it worked, actually, for a couple nights," she told the outlet earlier this year. "And then my mom came home and was like, 'This is literally a piece of cardboard you're plugging in. You're using your phone in your room.' Oh, my gosh, I remember getting in trouble for that."
It hasn't always been easy being Gates's daughter. In the Netflix documentary "What's Next? The Future With Bill Gates," she said she lost friends because of a conspiracy theory suggesting her father used COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips into recipients.
"I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors," she said.
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