Sam Altman

On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, in a terse statement saying he had not been consistently candid with it. What followed was one of the strangest weeks in corporate history. Microsoft offered him a job, nearly all of OpenAI's employees signed a letter threatening to leave, and within five days Altman was back in charge and most of the board that had removed him was gone.

The episode fits a chart in which power struggles with partners are front and center. Altman was born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, at around 5 a.m. by his own account to an astrologer, so the rising sign and houses below are good approximations rather than certainties. At that time, Saturn and Pluto sit together in Scorpio in the seventh house. The seventh house is the sector astrologers associate with partnerships, contracts and open adversaries; Scorpio is the sign of control and intensity, Saturn the planet of tests and structure, Pluto the planet of power and upheaval. It would be hard to design a placement that better matches a fight with one's own board.

Beyond that pairing, Taurus dominates. His Sun is at the start of Taurus in the first house, and the Moon and Mars are together in Taurus there too, with Taurus also rising if the time is right. Taurus is patient, steady and focused on resources and long-term value, and so much of it on the Ascendant tends to read as calm, unhurried and hard to rattle. Altman's public manner, soft-spoken and even, matches that description closely, even in moments of chaos.

He grew up in St. Louis, got his first computer at eight, and went to Stanford to study computer science before leaving after two years to start Loopt, a location-sharing app, in Y Combinator's first batch in 2005. Loopt sold in 2012 without becoming a hit, but Altman became a fixture at Y Combinator and served as its president from 2014 to 2019, helping to fund and advise thousands of startups.

Jupiter sits in Aquarius in the eleventh house, the area astrologers read for networks, groups and future-minded causes. Aquarius is the sign of technology and collective ideas, and Jupiter expands what it touches. A Jupiter in the eleventh describes someone whose growth runs through networks and communities, which is close to a definition of startup investing, and of the project he co-founded in 2015. OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab with the stated goal of ensuring that advanced AI benefits humanity, and in November 2022 it released ChatGPT, which brought generative AI to hundreds of millions of people.

Mercury and Venus fall in Aries in the twelfth house, the hidden end of the chart, which may say something about a public figure whose thinking is often described as hard to read. He married Oliver Mulherin in 2024.

The Taurus calm is what most people see. The Scorpio in the seventh house is the part of the story that came into view in November 2023.