OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on January 18, 2024.
Stefan Vermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will stand to make millions of dollars after Reddit goes public thanks to a series of bets against the online discussion board company dating back to 2014. Altman will own 9.2% of Reddit’s voting rights after its initial public offering. Based on information in the company’s prospectus.
Altman is currently reportedly Eager to raise trillions of dollars for chip development, microsoft– Supports OpenAI’s artificial intelligence computing needs and has invested in dozens of startups over the years. For that, Asanawas listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020. instacart, debuted on the Nasdaq in September. Before launching OpenAI in 2015, Altman was president of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, where he was involved with many small and medium-sized companies.
In 2014, Altman led Reddit’s $50 million Series B funding round, and after using the service every day for nine years, he wrote: blog post.
“Reddit is an example of what seemed like a silly toy to waste time on, turning into something very interesting,” he wrote. “It’s been an important community for me over the years. You can find like-minded people that you don’t always find in the real world.”
In the first half of 2021, Reddit raised a Series E round, in which Altman invested $50 million.
And in the second half of this year, Altman put another $10 million into Reddit as the company raised about $512 million in funding. At that point, the value of Altman’s $50 million investment since the beginning of the year had risen 45%.
Reddit’s Class A and Class B shares are spread across five different entities, giving Altman more shares than CEO Steve Huffman, according to Thursday’s filing. Reddit has not yet told investors how many Class A shares it plans to sell in the IPO.
Altman served on Reddit’s board until 2021, but is no longer a director, according to the filing. He is currently looking to increase adoption of his AI services at OpenAI, including his popular ChatGPT chatbot. Reddit said in its filing that it sees competition from large-scale language models that can generate human-like text in response to a few words of written input. Some of the LLMs listed include Google’s Gemini, startups Anthropic, and ChatGPT.
As part of the IPO, Reddit plans to offer stock to some users and moderators, colloquially known as Redditors. That’s probably a plus for Altman.
“It’s always bothered me that users create most of the value of sites like reddit, but they own none of that value,” he said in a 2014 blog post.
He went on to say that investors in the Series B round will give 10% of their shares to Reddit users.
“I hope that over time community ownership will increase,” he wrote.
clock: FirstMark’s Heitzman says Reddit is a litmus test to gauge investor appetite for non-AI
