Greg Brockman

Male

White

Coarse public-record coding; race is a noisy, interpretive category.

Multi-generation American

Born and raised in North Dakota; family origins beyond that are not established in the sources used.

Two physician parents in North Dakota. No source describes a period when he needed to rely on them, and none says he did not.

not established

His salary and equity terms at Stripe and OpenAI are not established in the sources used.

not established

No student or other debt is reported; not established either way.

Both parents are physicians at Altru Health System in Grand Forks: Dr. Ron Brockman and Dr. Ellen Feldman.

As reported in February 2007; their positions today are not established.

Both parents hold medical degrees.

Inferred from the "Dr." titles and physician employment in the cited article.

Thompson, North Dakota, a small town in Grand Forks County. MIT Technology Review describes him growing up on a hobby farm.

A hobby farm means a small holding kept alongside other work, not a farm that supported the household. Nothing found says the parents farmed for a living.

Red River High School, a public high school in Grand Forks. He also took classes at the University of North Dakota while a student there.

The article names the school; that it is public is not stated in the article.

Grew up far from any tech cluster. He moved east for Harvard in 2008 and to the Bay Area to join Stripe in 2010.

North Dakota to Cambridge, Massachusetts for Harvard (2008) and MIT, then to Palo Alto and San Francisco for Stripe (2010).

Patrick Collison, an MIT classmate, founded Stripe with his brother John. Brockman joined the company before it launched.

Co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and others; Elon Musk and Altman were its co-chairs.

22

Joined Stripe in 2010; birth year of 1987 per Wikipedia. Forbes's page lists his age as 37, which would imply 1988, so the year is uncertain by one.

5

Stripe from 2010 to May 2015, before OpenAI's December 2015 founding.

2

Stripe and OpenAI; any earlier student jobs are not established.

Taught himself to program during a gap year after high school, working first on a chatbot. Earlier access to computing at home is not established in the sources used.

He led recruiting of OpenAI's founding research team, which included researchers who left well-paid jobs elsewhere to join.

No degree. Entered Harvard in 2008, transferred to MIT, and left MIT in 2010 to join Stripe.

not established

Not established; how Harvard and MIT were paid for is not reported in the sources used.

MIT put him in the same cohort as Patrick Collison, whose startup he joined. His own account is that he moved to MIT to be around people he could learn from.

not established

Early earnings and his Stripe equity terms are not established in the sources used.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit. Its December 2015 announcement says donors, including Musk, Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, Infosys and YC Research, had committed $1 billion, while expecting to spend only a small fraction of it in the first years.

Coded originCapital as angel and raisedOutsideCapital as true because outside backers, not his own money, funded the start. The pledges were donations, not equity purchases, so neither enum fits cleanly.

Held Stripe equity from his years as an early employee and CTO. The size is not established in the sources used.

Told by Sam Altman that the goal was to build safe human-level AI, and followed a dinner in Menlo Park with Musk, Sutskever and others, per his own account.

His own account; not independently corroborated here.

Forbes reports that in 2026 court testimony he said he owns about 2.5% to 3% of OpenAI. The AP reports he said he did not personally invest money in OpenAI, and put the stake at nearly $30 billion.

The AP and Forbes give different values for the same stake ($30 billion versus over $20 billion, at different valuations of a private company). How and when the equity was granted is not established in the sources used.

28

Co-founding OpenAI in December 2015, with 1987 as birth year.

Joined Stripe as online payments were being rebuilt for developers, then co-founded OpenAI just before deep learning became a heavily funded field.

Interpretive framing; the OpenAI announcement describes deep learning's recent results.

San Francisco Bay Area.

Forbes lists his current residence as San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence

25500000000

Forbes's figure as shown on its profile page on October 9, 2026. It is a point-in-time estimate. Most of it rests on his stake in OpenAI, a private company whose value is an estimate that moves with each funding or secondary-sale price.

Journalistic estimate

2026

Largely paper. Both OpenAI and Stripe are private, and no sale of his shares is established in the sources used.

Wealth, not income. Forbes attributes it to OpenAI equity and, to a smaller degree, Stripe equity. His salary is not established in the sources used.

President and co-founder of OpenAI, which he helped build from a nonprofit research lab into a company valued at $852 billion, according to the AP.

Uncapped

On May 18, 2026, the jury ruled for Altman, Brockman and OpenAI, finding Musk's claims barred by the statute of limitations. The jury did not rule on whether the allegations were true.

Wikipedia cites a Wall Street Journal report of the verdict. Whether an appeal followed is not established in the sources used.

Elon Musk sued Sam Altman, Brockman and OpenAI, alleging they double-crossed him by moving the company away from its founding nonprofit mission and into moneymaking, behind his back. The AP reported this as Musk's allegation.

The defendants' position at trial is not described in the sources used.

After

Incidental

The suit concerns the company's conversion, which bears on the value of his stake, so this coding is a judgment call.

None

In November 2023 the board that removed Altman also took Brockman off the board, and he announced he was quitting. Microsoft's CEO said both would join Microsoft; within days Altman was reinstated and Brockman returned. Public coverage treated the two as a pair.

Returned to OpenAI after the November 2023 episode, took a sabbatical from August to November 2024, and came back as president.