Startup mafia · Lineage

The OpenAI Diaspora

Researchers and operators who left OpenAI to found Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines, Perplexity and more.

24 founders 47 companies Root: OpenAI →

Each node links through — click a founder or company to keep exploring. ↓ CSV ↓ JSON

Every founder in the OpenAI lineage

24 founders · 47 companies

Founders who worked at or founded OpenAI and went on to build their own companies.

E Elon Musk 14 founded

Zip2 1996 PayPal 1998 X.com 1999 SpaceX 2002 Tesla 2003 Hyperloop One 2014 Neuralink 2016 The Boring Company 2016 Thud 2017 xAI 2023 X Corp. 2023 SpaceXAI 2023 X Holdings Corp 2023 America PAC

S Sam Altman 5 founded

Loopt 2005 Hydrazine Capital 2012 Worldcoin 2019 Merge Lab 2025 Merge Labs

I Igor Babuschkin 3 founded

xAI 2023 SpaceXAI 2023 River AI

D Daniel Levy 2 founded

Safe Superintelligence 2024 Safe Superintelligence Inc. 2024

D David Luan 2 founded

Adept 2022 Adept AI 2022

I Ilya Sutskever 2 founded

Safe Superintelligence 2024 Safe Superintelligence Inc. 2024

T Tom Brown 2 founded

SolidStage 2012 Anthropic 2021

A Aravind Srinivas 1 founded

Perplexity AI 2022

B Barret Zoph 1 founded

Thinking Machines Lab 2025

C Chris Olah 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

D Daniela Amodei 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

D Dario Amodei 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

J Jack Clark 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

J Jared Kaplan 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

J John Schulman 1 founded

Thinking Machines Lab 2025

M Mira Murati 1 founded

Thinking Machines Lab 2025

P Peter Chen 1 founded

Covariant 2017

P Pieter Abbeel 1 founded

Covariant 2017

R Rocky Duan 1 founded

Covariant 2017

S Sam McCandlish 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

T Tianhao Zhang 1 founded

Covariant 2017

T Tim Shi 1 founded

Cresta 2017

T Tom Henighan 1 founded

Anthropic 2021

T Trevor Blackwell 1 founded

Anybots 2001

Explore more lineages on the mafias index, or download the full founder graph →