By Keach Hagey and Laura J. Nelson

After testifying in the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, company co-founder and president Greg Brockman would grab his wife's hand, swap his suit for his black leather jacket and head to work.

He was tackling a new, high-stakes project: merging OpenAI's ChatGPT, Codex coding tools and API into one super app. Though the work started after court adjourned at 2 p.m., and sometimes required staying up past midnight, it was, he said in an interview, "energizing."

After a career spent in the shadow of better-known co-founders like Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, 38, has stepped into the spotlight this year. His new role overseeing product at OpenAI has made him the face of the company's new strategy on the eve of its IPO.

The world learned from Brockman's testimony that his OpenAI stake is worth close to $30 billion, making him one of the 100 richest people in the world on paper, and vastly richer than the reported wealth of Altman, who holds no direct equity in the artificial intelligence pioneer.

Brockman and his wife, Anna, have also taken on new political prominence, giving $50 million to two super PACs aligned with President Trump and the AI industry. They have dined with Trump, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi at the White House and celebrated the Kennedy Center honors with actor Sylvester Stallone.

Known as a "10x engineer," Silicon Valley speak for a coder who is 10 times as productive as the average worker, Brockman had no direct reports for years. Now two of OpenAI's most important divisions, comprising nearly 1,500 employees, report to him.

Altman said he talked Brockman into taking the role in February, after another executive had requested he tackle it. Brockman initially resisted, in part because he was managing the company's computing needs.

"In Greg's most optimistic, most idealist, most selfish version of the world, he would just write code on the most important thing," Altman said in an interview. "But he knows that leadership is sacrifice."

Just weeks into his new job, Brockman pulled the plug on the stand-alone app behind the video generator Sora, the anchor of OpenAI's historic licensing deal with Disney and a buzzy tool that Altman initially planned to leverage to build a social media network. For the sake of focusing the company's use of computing power, Brockman said, it had to go.

"We just couldn't do all the things," Brockman said matter-of-factly. "The company very much needed me to come in and help."

OpenAI, which kicked off the AI revolution, is staring down unprecedented competition from Google and Claude Code-maker Anthropic, which recently surpassed OpenAI's valuation. Codex, OpenAI's rival to Claude Code, now has more than four million weekly active users, an eightfold increase since the start of the year.

Most Sunday evenings, Brockman drafts "Top of Mind" memos to staff, which alternate between the shorthand of a heads-down builder and Silicon Valley swagger. "We have ambitions to scale it to the entire planet," he wrote recently of ChatGPT.

Some of Brockman's other writing, including emails and journal-like entries, were central to the trial, in which OpenAI prevailed. (Musk has said he will appeal.) One August 2017 entry read: "Financially, what will take me to $1B?" In an email from the same year, he wrote to Musk: "I am motivated by public recognition for my own work."

All-night coding binge

Brockman grew up in Thompson, N.D., a town of about 1,100 people in the Red River Valley, the third of four children.

His parents were doctors with a hobby farm with horses, guinea hens, geese, a cow and a pig. Miles from his closest friend, he got into math, science and, briefly, acting. His first paycheck, for $100, was for playing a gingerbread man in a local performance by the Christmas music behemoth Mannheim Steamroller.

He dropped out of Harvard after his freshman year, enrolled at MIT and dropped out in 2010 after a few months to become the fourth employee at a payments-processing firm called /dev/payments, later renamed Stripe.

He said in court that he put $6 on chief executive Patrick Collison's desk to buy his founder's shares. They are now worth more than $470 million.

At Stripe, employees would often come to work in the morning and find Brockman asleep at his desk, shoes off and wearing one of his many black American Giant hoodies after coding binges, pizza boxes strewn around him. Collison recalled Brockman learning one afternoon that a crucial, unexpected deadline had to either be met by the next morning, or in a month.

"Greg, being Greg, decided, 'Well, OK, we'll just write all the code for it we need tonight,'" Collison said.

Brockman left Stripe in May 2015. He recruited much of the early team for OpenAI, and when it launched later that year, the startup operated out of his living room.

The Brockmans

Greg said he met Anna at a dinner party in 2018 and it was a "love-at-first sight situation." Not long after they started dating, Daniela Amodei, now the president of Anthropic, bet Brockman $100 that Anna wasn't "the one."

When the couple married a year later, which included a civil ceremony at OpenAI with a robotic hand ring bearer, Amodei presented Brockman with a $100 check.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, Anna worked in tech, including at Stripe, although not at the same time as Brockman, he said. She is intensely private: almost no information, including her maiden name, is available online. In one political contribution last year, her profession was listed as "retired." She declined to comment.

The couple for years kept a low profile.

When Brockman went to his home state for a 2023 lecture, a Fargo television station introduced him as one of the creators of ChatGPT, but acknowledged that he wasn't as famous as other successful North Dakotans, like actor Josh Duhamel or basketball's Phil Jackson.

Brockman for years eschewed management jobs that would require more time in meetings, which he said derailed his concentration. He tried to stack his meetings on Tuesdays to preserve 80% of his time for writing code.

His colleagues at times complained to company leadership of Brockman coming into their projects with too little context and bigfooting their work. At one point in OpenAI's early years, Dario Amodei, who went on to co-found Anthropic, banned Brockman from working on the project that led to ChatGPT in part because he alienated one of the company's best researchers, according to people familiar with the matter.

When Altman was abruptly fired by the OpenAI board just before Thanksgiving in 2023, one of the reasons cited by board member Ilya Sutskever was Altman's inability to rein in Brockman.

Brockman learned in a call that he had been fired from the board, too, but not from his executive role. "We have to quit," he told his wife, according to a recent podcast interview -- even if they lost their equity. She agreed.

His exit prompted a domino-effect of other resignations and backlash that ultimately led to Altman's reinstatement five days later, a period employees now call "the blip."

"It was beyond a near-death experience," Brockman said.

A few months later, Sutskever, with whom he had once been inseparable, left OpenAI. Conversations to try to find a way to work together were intense. Anna brought Sutskever a cactus as a final offering.

"I felt like I just didn't know I wanted to keep doing it," Brockman said, his voice halting.

He fell into a slump, which he described as a period of "just being tired." He took a leave for three months during which he volunteered at the Arc Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, training a large-scale DNA language model.

"The thing I wanted out of that time was to build a little bit of perspective," he said.

Working Washington

When Brockman returned at the end of 2024, it was more as a leader taking on the company's massive machine-learning software and computing build-out. He started wearing a leather jacket, like one his older brother had once worn. It was a kind of symbol for his new mantra after the blip : "have the hard conversations."

Brockman, with his knack for explaining OpenAI's products to non-engineers, has become one of the most important ambassadors for AI to the Trump administration, showcasing its uses and promise to lawmakers and other powerful people.

That included presidential candidate Donald Trump in the summer of 2024. Before a fundraiser in Las Vegas, where tickets went for as much as $844,600 per couple, Trump met with a group that included Doug Burgum, who is now interior secretary, and Brockman. Altman had COVID-19 and didn't attend.

Brockman showed how ChatGPT could generate images and analyze information, including executive orders from Trump's first term. Trump described the chatbot's words as poetic, Brockman recalled.

Silicon Valley executives "figured out, before America did," that Republicans would help the AI industry get the electricity they needed to increase their computing power, Burgum said. "Greg Brockman was the tip of the spear."

"They're in the right places, talking to the right people," said Burgum, who is also from North Dakota. "Relationships matter."

Brockman was listed as a speaker in 2024 and 2025 at the American Enterprise Institute's World Forum, an invitation-only gathering of power brokers held at a private resort on the Georgia coast, according to agendas viewed by the Journal.

Last summer a group of political operatives and tech executives began discussing a way to replicate the success of Fairshake, a super PAC that spent millions in the 2024 election to back cryptocurrency champions in Congress, according to people familiar with the discussions. They wanted to do the same for the AI industry.

Brockman and his wife committed $50 million to the PAC, Leading the Future, and sent the first $25 million in September.

Leading the Future has spent almost $16 million through two subsidiaries to back candidates from both parties who support a national regulatory framework for AI. The group has announced support for about a dozen Democrats and a dozen Republicans.

Brockman said he didn't agree with all the PAC's spending and declined to discuss specifics. The couple said last year that they hoped to advance regulation that boosts AI to "improve quality of life for every person (and every animal)."

He and his wife also gave $12.5 million each to MAGA Inc., a super PAC aligned with Trump. Brockman said the contribution, which sparked some backlash against the company, was his idea. The contribution came as a surprise to some OpenAI executives, people familiar with the matter said.

"My wife and I are single-issue donors," he said, referring to AI.

Through the frenetic recent years of business, legal and political activity, Brockman couldn't recall the last time he and Anna had taken a vacation.

"Maybe that's post-AGI, once we've achieved the mission," he said, referring to the moment when AI outsmarts humans. Then, pausing, he added: "It's not just about me. I think my wife also is someone who deserves some time."

Write to Keach Hagey at Keach.Hagey@wsj.com and Laura J. Nelson at laura.nelson@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 29, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)

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