Republicans Investigate Sam Altman’s Personal Investments For Conflicts Of Interest

Republicans are investigating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, probing whether his personal investments present any conflicts of interest for the AI behemoth. On Friday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a letter to Altman asking for more information about his investments and details from the audit committee put in place to review any potential conflicts.

Altman’s net worth is about $3.5 billion, according to Forbes estimates. But unlike most CEOs who are heavily invested in their own company, his wealth is tied entirely to his stakes in hundreds of startups including Reddit, Stripe and Helion. Altman famously has no equity in OpenAI, but according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, asked OpenAI to lead a funding round for nuclear fusion startup Helion into which he’s personally invested $375 million back in 2021. (OpenAI did not fund Helion but agreed to buy power from the startup from 2028). He asked OpenAI-backer Softbank to join Helion’s funding round, according to the report.

It’s not an isolated incident: Altman also sought OpenAI’s backing for Stoke Space, a SpaceX rival in which he is a shareholder, according to the WSJ report. Lack of clarity around Altman’s personal investments was cited as one of the reasons for his brief ouster in 2023.

Scrutiny into Altman’s investments comes amid an ongoing high-stakes trial against Musk, who alleges Altman and other OpenAI cofounders deceived him when they transitioned OpenAI from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure to raise more funding. Testifying on Tuesday, Altman rejected Musk’s claims and said Musk wanted total control of OpenAI and proposed merging the company with Tesla.

In case you missed it, Forbes published its eighth annual AI 50 list, with sponsoring partner Mayfield, that highlights the most promising privately held AI companies in the world.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

BIG PLAYS

San Francisco has been flooded with AI millionaires, leading to a surge in prices for rentals and luxury real estate alike. After all, more than 600 current and former OpenAI employees collectively sold $6.6 billion worth of company stock in a secondary sale in October 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported. About 75 of them cashed out $30 million worth of shares—the cap set by the AI giant.

Also notable: OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever confirmed he held a $7 billion stake in OpenAI during his testimony in the Musk v. Altman trial, Forbes reported.

HUMANS OF AI

Janitor AI, which lets people create and chat with romantic fantasy AI characters, says its 15 million total users skew female, with 70 to 80% of users identifying as women, according to a recent Forbes profile. But the AI startup is run by three young men including 26-year-old founder and CEO Jan Zoltkowski and COO Hugo Smith. Founded in 2023, it’s exploded in popularity with some 100 million monthly visitors to the site, becoming the tenth most visited consumer AI site, according to Similarweb. But it has faced problems navigating the muddled and messy world of sexual content, including a surprise $180,000 Cloudflare bill and backlash from users over its moderation practices.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

Periodic Labs, a startup which is building an AI scientist and was recently featured on Forbes’ AI 50 brink list, is in talks to raise funding at a $7.5 billion valuation. AMP, a VC firm founded by ex-Andreessen Horowitz partner Anjney Midha, will lead the round, three sources familiar with the deal told Forbes. When the round closes, the buzzy startup is expected to see its valuation increase about sixfold in just eight months.

Also notable: Billionaire Bret Taylor’s AI customer service startup Sierra raised $950 million at a more than $15 billion valuation.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

In the AI era, every company is looking for places and workflows to automate, but without a deep understanding of exactly how work happens, they’re “shooting in the dark,” says Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith. Her $1.3 billion startup builds software that sits on employees’ laptops, silently watching and recording them as they do their routine work, to automatically generate step-by-step guides that are being used to train new employees and increasingly AI agents. The startup announced on Monday that it has crossed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue, Forbes reported.

DEEP DIVE

HED: This AI Insurance Company With An All-Night Cafe And Cheeky Corgi Is Now A Unicorn

At the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Corgi, an AI insurance startup, most conference rooms have a mattress tucked into the corner. There’s a reason for that: the startup’s employees work 7 days a week in the office and sometimes they need a place to crash. For CEO Nico Laqua, the routine is even more extreme. Most nights, he sleeps in a room called the “Founders’ Room” and showers at a nearby Equinox gym. “I technically have a room [in an apartment] but I never really go there,” he tells Forbes.

The space occupies the thin line between tech startup and lived-in frat house, cluttered with bags of trash, well-worn furniture and the occasional stray banana peel. The air is stale, like at the end of a 72-hour hackathon. The company’s mascot, a brown and white corgi named Trudy, is often underfoot. The pet is collectively owned by employees, who feed, walk and bathe her with the help of an AI bot on Telegram that reminds employees to carry out the tasks. Downstairs, the startup owns and operates the Corgi Cafe, an all-night coffee house that’s open to the public, which has become a beacon for the city’s set of 20-something startup founders who work until twilight trying to hit product deadlines or close deals.

The scene is not quite what you’d expect from an insurance company, but these days anything goes in the intense, frenzied world of AI startups, even those trying to fix something as banal as managing claims.

And that’s exactly where two-year-old Corgi is trying to cash in, using AI to generate quotes for clients, evaluating their workflows, then pricing its insurance policies. It also uses AI to manage claims, instead of sending them to teams of human evaluators that are often working overseas. In addition to providing insurance for startups themselves, they also allow startups to sell insurance to their own customers. “AI agents are talking to other AI agents in order to do these sorts of tasks,” says Laqua.

Quirkiness aside, the two-year-old company is finding its groove. Already Corgi claims to have annualized revenue around $100 million from thousands of startup customers, including Deel, the HR and payroll startup; Artisan, the AI company that has become infamous in San Francisco for its “stop hiring humans” billboards; and Eragon, an enterprise AI company. Corgi, for example, insures Eragon in the burgeoning category of “AI liability,” protecting the company against lawsuits if its AI models hallucinate or produce errors for clients. It took less than 24 hours to get a policy quote, and the process was all digital — without having to take calls from human reps, says Josh Sirota, CEO of Eragon. “They understand what startup speed is,” he says.

On Wednesday, Corgi announced a $160 million funding round, led by the growth equity firm TCV, vaulting the company to unicorn status at a $1.3 billion valuation. That same day, Corgi launched a new service providing insurance for long-haul truckers, though it didn’t name who its customers are.

Read the full story on Forbes.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

“Directionally very bad,” reads one (now widely shared) text between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former CTO Mira Murati during Altman’s widely publicized ouster in 2023. Released thanks to the Musk v. Altman trial, the stream of text messages show how Altman fervently tried to return to the company he cofounded while Murati gave him updates. People on X started converting the text messages into AI-generated musicals and short movies, because of course they did. Some of my favorites are here and here.