OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, are among nine billionaires who recently signed the Giving Pledge, an effort launched by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, his then wife, Melinda French Gates, and the financier Warren Buffett in 2010 to encourage rich people to commit to give more than half of their wealth to charity during their lifetimes or in their wills.
Altman has not had a significant presence in the philanthropy world other than a $10 million donation he pledged in 2015 to launch YC Research, a nonprofit research lab devoted to creating new technologies that the organization will make freely available. The organization is connected to Y Combinator, a start-up incubator in Silicon Valley that invests in businesses and nonprofits. Altman served as its president from 2014 to 2019 before focusing more on getting OpenAI off the ground.
Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit with a stated mission to “build artificial general intelligence that is safe and benefits all of humanity.” OpenAI later reworked its corporate structure so it could accept money from investors to back a for-profit entity it established.
Altman was at the center of the storm that hit OpenAI late last year when the board members of the company, which developed the ChatGPT and DALL-E artificial intelligence tools, fired him and then reinstated him five days later after a number of OpenAI employees and investors expressed outrage.
Mulherin and Altman say in their Giving Pledge letter that they intend to focus their giving “on supporting technology that helps create abundance for people, so that they can then build the scaffolding even higher.” Bloomberg News in March estimated Altman’s net worth at $2 billion, reflecting his non-OpenAI investments. Altman has said he doesn’t own equity in OpenAI.
Other new signers of the pledge include:
- Robert Goldfarb, who led the investment firm Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb until retiring in recent years.
- Jahm Najafi, who founded the Phoenix investment firm Najafi Companies and is vice chairman of the Phoenix Suns professional basketball team, and his wife, Cheryl Najafi, an entrepreneur who founded EverydayDishes.com, The Cause Collection, and Kara Aware. She also founded the Broken Butterfly Project, an effort to prevent gun violence.
- Hemant Taneja, who leads the technology investment firm, General Catalyst, and his wife, Jessica Schantz Taneja, a real estate developer who owns and operates Dhyana Grove Farm, a 90-acre farm and winery in Ben Lomond, Calif. The couple give through their Taneja Family Foundation.
- Marco Dunand, a co-founder of Mercuria, a Swiss energy and commodities trading firm, and his wife, Suzan Craig Dunand, who owns the Tahi estate, an ecological retreat in New Zealand.
See the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list to learn about what some of the wealthiest philanthropists are supporting and see who on the most recent Philanthropy 50 has signed the Giving Pledge.
