Aug 13, 2026
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Add us on GoogleOpenAI’s billionaire CEO Sam Altman is one of the top leaders in Silicon Valley, but 20 years ago, he had his own “Sliding Doors” moment that could’ve very well led him down a path on Wall Street instead. Altman, 41, told a room full of interns in Big Tech last month that, after his sophomore year at Stanford, he’d gone after an internship at Goldman Sachs, mainly because everyone around him wanted one. He even got the gig, but ultimately turned it down.
"I had accepted an offer to work at Goldman Sachs after sophomore year, which — I mean, it sounds unbelievably terrible now," Altman said during an onstage interview at Internapalooza, the annual San Francisco gathering for tech interns, on July 27. "But at the time, that was the cool thing. That was what everybody wanted to do. And so I got peer pressured and kind of tricked into it."
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Altman said he “dutifully applied,” and got the job. “I thought, really cool," Altman told Cory Levy. "And then I didn't do it, to do a startup."
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That startup was Loopt, a location-sharing app Altman co-founded in 2005 and ran as CEO. It landed a spot in Y Combinator's inaugural summer batch that same year, alongside Reddit. Seven years later, Green Dot Corp. acquired it for $43.4 million in cash, and even set $9.8 million aside just to retain Altman’s staff at Loopt, according to the announcement Green Dot filed with the SEC.
When asked what his parents had to say about his decision, Altman said he actually caught more flak for his decision to drop out of Stanford than he did for turning down the Goldman Sachs internship. "Internships are a very low stakes thing," he said. "I think they were a little upset when I dropped out of college, but they didn't care about the internship."
Why Goldman Sachs internships are so prized
Altman walked away from Goldman Sachs when it was having a great deal of success. The company went public six years earlier, and its annual report for fiscal 2005 shows net revenues of $24.78 billion and record earnings per share for the second straight year. Henry Paulson was still serving as CEO; little did anyone know, in about a year, he would become Treasury Secretary of the United States, nominted by then-President George W. Bush.
Notably, though, getting a Goldman Sachs internship was considerably easier back then. Even a decade ago, Goldman accepted roughly 5% of internship applicants, according to internal data shared with Fortune. But that rate has dropped like a stone: Goldman saw just a 0.9% acceptance rate in 2024, the first year it dipped below 1%, and it was even worse for the 2025 class, which attracted more than 360,000 applicants for a 0.7% rate.
Goldman declined to give Fortune an applicant count or exact rate for 2026, but confirmed it stayed below 1% for a third consecutive year.
For some context: Harvard, MIT and Stanford each admitted between 3% and 4% of applicants in their most recent cycles. So, you might say it’s easier to get accepted by a top Ivy League school than it is getting through the front doors of Goldman Sachs as an intern.
The role Altman turned down is what Goldman calls its summer analyst position — a roughly 10-week rotation inside a division, paid at the same base rate as a first-year analyst but prorated and without a bonus. According to a 2025 report from Fortune, the salary for this position, based in New York, exists within the range of $110,000 to $125,000. Not too shabby for a young 20-something fresh out of college.
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(It’s worth noting the Goldman Sachs internship, by all accounts, is an extremely difficult gig. Back in 2021, a survey of roughly a dozen first-year analysts leaked to the press and went viral on social media, revealing that young staffers were working upwards of 95 hours a week, with one analyst saying “there was a point where I was not eating, showering or doing anything else other than working from morning until after midnight.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon pledged to protect junior bankers’ hours shortly after.)
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OpenAI is now hiring the bankers Altman never became
Two decades after he turned down Goldman Sachs, Altman’s company has successfully recruited top minds from the bank. OpenAI has more than 100 former investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley under an internal effort codenamed Project Mercury, Bloomberg reported in October 2025. Participants are paid $150 an hour to write prompts and build financial models for deal types including restructurings and IPOs, which is the typical work that you’d expect for a junior banker at one of these Wall Street firms.
Goldman is also, coincidentally, working with OpenAI on its planned IPO, according to CNBC, in addition to Morgan Stanley. OpenAI confidentially filed a draft prospectus with the SEC in June; last week, it completed a roughly $7 billion tender offer letting current and former staff sell stock at an $852 billion valuation, which is just one of many signals suggesting the IPO timeline is still fluid.
Solomon, who has previously said AI's disruption is survivable, also said he expects AI to reduce the number of people Goldman starts with over the next few years, though not dramatically. Though, he did note his firm will continue to hire heavily out of school.
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Dave Smith is the VP of Content at Wise Publishing and Editor-in-Chief at Moneywise and Money.ca. His work has also been published in Fortune, Business Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA Today.
