Birth data from him is ‘around’ 5 am CST, April 22, 1985, Chicago, Illinois (41N51; 87W39) in an email to Jessica Josephine. ‘Around’ indicates the birth time may or may not be almost accurate. It has at least a 7-minute margin of error. From 4.55 to 5.05am there are 2 significant changes. The ascendant moved to Taurus at 4.58.30 and the Sun moved to house 12 at 5.04.15.
His chart’s astrodyne report
His birth chart reveals the character and mind behind the face.
Sam Altman has a high-discord chart and discord expressing as destructive thoughts and feelings has a high potential to do harm and cause damage.
The Sun – his desire for power and significance; Moon – his mind and mentality; Taurus – his I have attitude; and house 1 – his personality and physical wellbeing – dominate and they’re all discordant.
The prominent and discordant Mars, Saturn and Pluto depict active thought-cell groups that are working to attract mishap and misfortune. Neptune – his desire for idealism and capacity to imagine – is prominent and harmonious.
The dominant Sun marks for a big sense of self-importance and a powerful urge to be somebody. It’s sesquisquare (agitation) Uranus – his desire to be different; trine (luck) Neptune – his desire for idealism; and opposition (separation) Pluto – his desire to contribute to the common good and coercive control by invisible intelligences. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are retrograde indicating their unconscious desires are somewhat repressed.
Sun is conjunction ascendant in the first decanate of Taurus – Lepus the hare – and his innate timidity is inclined to express as fear and insecurity and a lust for money and material things. He has the ability to imagine the future and use his imagination (Neptune) to shape his life. Lepus – his dominant decanate – is discordant so obstinacy is a major character defect.
Moon is in the third decanate of Taurus – Auriga, the charioteer – and he has the capacity to triumph over the physical and other limitations imposed by his environment and utilize money to attain spiritual goals. His life and career are inclined to travel a steady path and his spiritual growth is linked to what he does for others.
The prominence of Taurus makes him stubborn and set in his ways, He’s a routine person who dislikes sudden change.
Moon is conjunction Mars – planet of aggression and energized effort – so his ‘I have’ practical mind can take the initiative and risks (Mars) associated with setting up a business in the hope of making a profit.
The Moon is exact opposition Saturn so his mentality is embedded with fear, anxiety and insecurity. The Mars-Saturn opposition maps a high-discord thought-cell compound involving his aggressive urge and desire for security that inclines towards haste, rush, worry, overwork, energy depletion, self-destruction, physical wear and tear, accident and loss.
Mercury – his intellectual urge – is in the first decanate of Aries – Triangulum – so his ‘I am’ intellect is inclined to lead the way and pioneer but his aggression (Mars) can easily turn destructive seeking revenge and payback.
Mercury is conjunction Venus – his social urge – in house 12 (his secret life and disappointments); and square Neptune – planet of idealism and schemes – so his objective thoughts can be vague, confusing and out of touch with reality. Venus – his weakest planet – is retrograde. It turned direct in November 1987.
The intellectual planets Mercury and Uranus have below average power so his feelings and hunches – the prominent Moon – rather than reason are influencing his judgments and decisions.
Jupiter, his religious urge and desire for benevolence and philanthropy, is weak. It’s in house 11 (his friends) and parallel Saturn, his security urge and desire to serve self-interest.
The Midheaven – his business interests – is parallel Neptune (the big corporation planet). Saturn – the cusp ruler of house 10 (business, credit and social standing) – is his worst planet.
The high discord opposition aspects involving house 1 and house 7 depict a very painful and distressing conflict of interest as warring thought-cells work to separate his personal life and interests from his partners and the public.
His story
Sam Altman became an entrepreneur and investor.
His mother is a dermatologist and his father was a real-estate broker. He was born in Chicago and raised in St Louis, Missouri, has 3 siblings and attended John Burroughs (private) School in Ladue, Missouri. He studied computer science for 2 years at Stanford University (house 9) before dropping out in 2005 without earning a bachelor’s degree.
In 2005 Altman co-founded Loopt, a location-based social networking mobile application which failed to gain traction with users. It was acquired by the Green Dot Corporation in March 2012 and in April 2012 he and his brother, Jack (house 3), founded Hydrazine Capital.
In 2011 he became a partner (house 7) at Y Combinator (YC), a technology startup accelerator and in February 2014 became its president (house 10).
In October 2015, he announced YC Continuity, a $700 million equity fund investing in YC companies as they matured; and in March 2019 he transitioned from President of YC to Chairman of the Board (Sun) to focus on OpenAI an artificial intelligence research organization (Uranus).
In an interview in 2016 his mother said he’s prone to what she called ‘cyberchondria,’ referring to his obsession (Puto) with researching his maladies (house 6) on the internet.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, Altman spent the first few weeks of lockdown (Pluto) in a state of isolation (Mercury and Venus – the rulers of house 6 – are conjunction in house 12). He holed up at home (house 4), cutting off ‘any out-of-household contact’ and even disinfecting his vegetables (house 6). In an email to Insider, he wrote: ‘My partner (house 7) complained one night that the food I made smelled like a swimming pool, and that’s when I realized things had gone too far.’
Like many of his Silicon Valley peers, Altman is fixated (Pluto) on delaying death (house 8-Saturn) and this urgency (Mars) grew when his father died in 2018.
He has used his wealth (house 2) to fund tech startups dedicated to extending the human lifespan, including a $180 million investment in Retro Biosciences, which is studying the effects of cellular reprogramming, autophagy, and plasma-inspired therapeutics on human life expectancy. He’s also secured himself (Saturn) a spot on the waiting list for Nectome, a company that promises to upload his brain (Mercury) to the cloud so it might one day be revived in a simulation.
Altman is a vegetarian and doomsday prepper (Saturn). He proactively prepares for emergencies, such as natural disasters, and other disasters caused by political or economic crises, which may cause disruption to social order. He’s stated: ‘I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.’ (It indicates that the high-discord Moon-Saturn opposition in his chart is playing a leading role in his life story.)
In 2023 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people (Sun) in the world and CEO of the Year.
On November 17, 2023 he was fired as CEO of OpenAI and four days later was reinstated.
The world is counting on Altman to act in the best interest of humanity with a technology (Uranus) which, by his own admission, could be a weapon of mass destruction (Pluto).
He lives in San Francisco.
Biographical data is from his Wikipedia entry.
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