Sam Altman Was Bending the World to His Will Long Before OpenAI

Lowell Winer was at his office in Irvine, California, when he got a phone call: Sam Altman wanted a meeting. It was 2005, and Winer had no idea who Altman was. Altman told Winer, who was head of business development for Boost Mobile, that he’d been referred by a representative of the wireless brand’s parent company, Sprint.

Altman was the chief executive officer of a tiny, struggling startup called Loopt, which he founded earlier that year at the age of 19. The idea was to use a cellphone’s GPS coordinates to connect users with friends nearby. The ...