Sam Altman’s Reddit stake now worth over $1 billion after post-earnings pop
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 9, 2024 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Sam Altman, the controversial CEO of OpenAI, has a stake in social media company Reddit that’s worth over $1 billion as of post-market trading on Tuesday.
Altman controls roughly 12.2 million shares of Reddit, a company he first invested in over a decade ago. Reddit shares soared about 20% in extended trading after the compny reported better-than-expected quarterly results and issued an optimistic forecast.
At Reddit’s after-hours share price of $98, Altman’s holdings are valued at about $1.2 billion.
Prior to the surging popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was released to the public in late 2022, Altman was best known as a startup investor and as the former president of Y Combinator. Altman’s investment portfolio includes past or present stakes in Airbnb, Uber, Instacart, Stripe and Asana, but one of his top bets was Reddit. Altman was on the social media platform’s board until around January 2022, when the company said he had recently stepped down.
Reddit went public in March at $34 a share.
Altman is among the company’s largest shareholders, behind only Condé Nast parent Advance Magazine Publishers, Chinese internet giant Tencent and Fidelity. In 2021, as the tech market was booming, Altman invested a combined $60 million in Reddit over two funding rounds, according to the company’s IPO prospectus from earlier this year.
Top shareholders were forbidden from selling Reddit shares for six months during the “lockup period,” which expired in September. There’s no indication that Altman has sold any of his stock.
Altman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this month, OpenAI closed its latest funding round at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive roster of investment firms and tech companies. The company expects about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC confirmed in September.
Altman told employees last month that there are no plans for him to receive a “giant equity stake” in the company.
In March, OpenAI said Altman was rejoining the company’s board following the conclusion of an internal investigation by U.S. law firm WilmerHale into the events that led to his sudden ouster (and rapid reinstatement) late last year.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report
Technology
Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’
Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.
Figure AI
Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”
Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”
The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.
In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”
The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.
Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.
The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.
Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.
Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.
The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.
Read the filing here:
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