OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Marries Long-Time Partner Aussie Oliver Mulherin

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has tied the knot with his long-time Australian partner Oliver Mulherin in a seaside ceremony. 

Altman confirmed the news with NBC after images of the wedding started circulating on social media on Thursday. The pictures showed the San Francisco-based couple in a tropical beach destination location, surrounded by palm trees in front of a dozen guests. 

Sam Altman is co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT.

The couple have kept their relationship very private throughout their time together. 

Couple Resides in San Francisco

Sam Altman just got married today.

Congratulations 👏 pic.twitter.com/kbUvGbLHOa

— Barsee 🐶 (@heyBarsee) January 11, 2024

Altman revealed to New York Magazine in September last year that the couple currently reside together after he purchased a $27 million house in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighbourhood. On the weekends, the couple live in a renovated 25-year-old house situated on a private ranch in Napa, California where Altman raises cows.

Altman’s husband, Oliver Mulherin is a software engineer who studied computer science at the University of Melbourne. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mulherin has also previously worked at Facebook’s parent company Meta for two years. 

The couple went to a White House dinner in June last year which honoured Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook, were also in attendance as guests.

Sam Altman’s Coming Out Experience 

Altman grew up as the oldest of four siblings in what he called a “middle-class Jewish family,” and shared a desire to start a family in the near future. He came out as gay in high school, which came as a surprise to his mother, who thought of Sam as “just sort of unisexual and techy.”

As Altman said on a 2020 podcast, his private high school was “not the kind of school where you would really stand up and talk about being gay and that was okay”.

When he was 17, the school invited students to speak on any topic they’d like for five minutes, and Altman decided he would come out then. 

“I don’t really get nervous for stuff, and I was so nervous to do this. Because I was like, mostly out… I almost changed the speech to not put my own personal story in there”, he said. 

“And I don’t even know why but I finally was like, “You know what? Like, I’ll just tell everybody I’m gay. Whatever. Like, what’s going to happen to me?” And then, it was sort of this moment where you kind of just go on autopilot. But I remember, I was like 17”, Altman recalled.