Sam Altman's coding abilities are minimal, yet he runs OpenAI. He's not alone. These top tech bosses have limited IT skills

Sam Altman's colleagues, insiders, engineers, and former co-workers described the coding and programming capabilities of the OpenAI chief as ‘very limited’. Such technical capabilities, it appears, are not needed to run the most sophisticated and popular AI firm behind the ChatGPT bot. But Altman is not alone. Did you know that founders and CEOs of some of the most popular tech companies could not code to save their lives? Here is a roundup.

A New Yorker exposé this month, based on interviews with numerous OpenAI employees and insiders who knew or worked with him, reported that Altman lacks strong coding experience and machine-learning expertise. He has “limited programming experience”, according to engineers, and even confuses basic AI/machine-learning terms. His success is a combination of communication skills, leadership, charisma, and boardroom influence rather than technical depth, which contrasts with his public image as a deep AI visionary or guru. Altman dropped out of Stanford's computer science programme after two years. He went on to co-found the location app Loopt. His current and former colleagues said Altman’s hands-on technical skills are minimal.

Seen as a visionary during his lifetime for launching multiple products, including the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, Jobs was not even an engineering student. The late co-founder of Apple was a liberal arts dropout with no coding background. He was legendary for his design intuition, which partially came from calligraphy classes he took part-time. Nevertheless, Jobs is considered one of the sharpest minds when it comes to product vision and marketing, rather than writing code.

One of the first success stories of Chinese tech entrepreneurship was Alibaba, the e-commerce giant. But did you know that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, had zero technical or programming know-how? Before founding Alibaba, he was an English teacher. Yet he went on to build one of the world’s largest e-commerce empires through his business acumen and persistence.

Chesky is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, but before that, he was a designer with no technical or coding background. His success came from turning an air mattress rental idea into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company. Gebbia was a graphic designer with no programming experience before he partnered with Chesky. Both of them studied in the Rhode Island School of Design.

Silbermann, who co-founded Pinterest, the visual discovery platform, is a Yale University political science graduate. He had no technical background but he built Pinterest into a major brand by being focused on product and user experience to scale the platform. Evan Sharp, the co-founder of Pinterest, was also a non-technical designer who helped shape the platform’s visual-first approach.

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of the team messaging platform Slack and photosharing site Flickr, had a background in philosophy rather than engineering.

But he taught himself to code at a young age, and used to design websites for others.
He studied philosophy at the University of Victoria and later at Cambridge, focusing on logic and epistemology. Butterfield's conceptual thinking and clarity of ideas, which are hallmarks of philosophical training, helped him build widely adopted technology platforms.