Mira Murati Net Worth

What Is Mira Murati's Net Worth and Salary?

Mira Murati is an Albanian-American technology executive, engineer, and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $1.5 billion.

Mira Murati became one of the most prominent executives of the artificial-intelligence boom through her work at OpenAI, where she helped oversee the development and deployment of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and other major AI systems. She joined OpenAI in 2018, rose to chief technology officer in 2022, and briefly served as interim CEO during the extraordinary boardroom crisis that temporarily removed Sam Altman from the company in November 2023. Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 and subsequently founded Thinking Machines Lab, recruiting an elite group of researchers from OpenAI and other leading AI companies.

Thinking Machines became one of the most highly valued startups ever created before establishing significant revenue. In July 2025, the company raised $2 billion in a seed financing round that valued it at $12 billion. Murati serves as co-founder and CEO and holds unusually strong voting control over the private company. Thinking Machines subsequently launched the model-training platform Tinker, developed new approaches to real-time human-AI interaction, and released its first open-weight model, Inkling. The overwhelming majority of Murati's wealth is tied to her ownership of Thinking Machines Lab, and her precise economic stake has not been publicly disclosed.

Thinking Machines Lab Stake

Murati's move from highly paid technology executive to billionaire entrepreneur came with the creation of Thinking Machines Lab.

The company emerged publicly in February 2025 with an unusually ambitious founding team made up largely of researchers and engineers recruited from other top AI laboratories. Early members included OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, former OpenAI research executive Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Luke Metz, and numerous other researchers with experience at OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Mistral.

Investor demand was extraordinary even before the company had released a commercial product.

In July 2025, Thinking Machines closed a $2 billion seed financing round at a $12 billion post-money valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment, with participation from Nvidia, Accel, AMD, Cisco, Jane Street, ServiceNow, and other investors. The financing was one of the largest initial funding rounds ever raised by a Silicon Valley startup.

Murati also negotiated unusually powerful governance rights. Investment documents reportedly gave her a board vote with enough weight to prevail even if all other directors voted against her. Founding shareholders were also issued shares carrying dramatically greater voting power than ordinary shares.

Her exact percentage ownership has not been publicly disclosed. Because Thinking Machines remains privately held, the value of her stake exists primarily as private-company equity rather than cash and can change significantly with future financing rounds.

Investors later discussed financing Thinking Machines at valuations reaching tens of billions of dollars. Those discussions did not replace the company's publicly established $12 billion financing valuation. Nvidia made an additional significant investment in Thinking Machines in March 2026, but the amount and valuation attached to that investment were not disclosed.

(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

Early Life

Ermira "Mira" Murati was born on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, Albania. Her parents were teachers, and Murati developed an unusually strong interest in mathematics and science while growing up.

She competed in math competitions and Olympiads and, at age 16, received a United World Colleges scholarship that allowed her to leave Albania to attend Pearson College on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.

Murati subsequently moved to the United States and pursued a dual-degree program involving Colby College and Dartmouth College. She earned a bachelor's degree from Colby in 2011 and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in mechanical engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering in 2012.

While at Dartmouth, Murati participated in the school's Formula Racing program, working with other engineering students on hybrid race cars. The experience combined mechanical engineering, electronics, software, and project management, foreshadowing the cross-disciplinary product roles she would later hold in Silicon Valley.

Goldman Sachs, Aerospace And Tesla

Murati's early professional experience included a summer analyst position with Goldman Sachs in Tokyo and work at aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace.

In 2013, she joined Elon Musk's Tesla as a product manager.

Murati worked on Tesla's Model X program during the electric SUV's development. Her responsibilities involved coordinating engineering, manufacturing, design, and product teams as the company attempted to turn an unusually complicated vehicle concept into a mass-produced product.

Tesla was simultaneously developing increasingly sophisticated software and driver-assistance technology. Murati has said that seeing artificial intelligence applied to physical products helped deepen her interest in the field.

She left Tesla in 2016.

Leap Motion

Murati next joined Leap Motion, a Silicon Valley startup developing technology that allowed computers and virtual-reality systems to track people's hand movements.

She became vice president of product and engineering.

Leap Motion's technology was impressive, but the company faced the difficult problem of finding applications compelling enough to move hand tracking from an experimental technology into a mass-market product.

Murati worked with engineering teams to identify practical uses for the technology and became increasingly interested in the broader challenge of how humans would interact with intelligent machines.

That interest led her to OpenAI.

OpenAI

Murati joined OpenAI in 2018, when the organization was still relatively small and largely known within the artificial-intelligence research community.

She initially worked as vice president of applied AI and partnerships. Her early responsibilities included OpenAI's supercomputing strategy and managing research teams.

Murati's responsibilities expanded rapidly as OpenAI moved from publishing research toward deploying products. By late 2020, she was overseeing research, product, and partnerships.

In May 2022, she was promoted to chief technology officer.

As CTO, Murati oversaw major portions of OpenAI's research, product development, deployment, and safety organizations. She became one of the executives most closely associated with systems including DALL-E and Codex and later with the explosive launch of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT was released publicly in November 2022 and became one of the fastest-adopted consumer technology products in history. Its success turned OpenAI from a relatively specialized research laboratory into one of the most important technology companies in the world.

Murati became a prominent public spokesperson for the company, discussing both the potential of increasingly capable AI systems and the need for safeguards, regulation, testing, and responsible deployment.

2023 OpenAI Leadership Crisis

Murati unexpectedly found herself running OpenAI in November 2023.

On November 17, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed CEO Sam Altman, saying it had lost confidence in his leadership. The board immediately appointed Murati interim CEO.

The decision triggered an extraordinary corporate revolt. OpenAI president Greg Brockman resigned, employees threatened to leave, and major investors pushed for Altman's reinstatement.

Murati's stint as chief executive lasted only several days. The board subsequently selected former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as another interim CEO before reaching an agreement that returned Altman to the company.

Murati returned to her role as CTO.

The crisis also exposed tensions surrounding OpenAI's unusual governance structure and the competing demands of AI safety, commercialization, fundraising, and control. Other important OpenAI figures, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, eventually departed the company.

Leaving OpenAI

On September 25, 2024, Murati announced that she was leaving OpenAI after approximately six and a half years.

She said she wanted to create the time and space to pursue her own exploration.

Her departure came during a broader reshuffling among the executives and researchers who had helped build OpenAI. Several former employees went on to launch or join heavily funded competitors, including Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, and Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence.

Rather than joining an established rival, Murati began recruiting a team for a new company of her own.

Thinking Machines Lab

Murati publicly unveiled Thinking Machines Lab in February 2025.

The company's founding philosophy differed somewhat from the race simply to create ever-larger artificial-intelligence models. Murati argued that AI systems should become more understandable and customizable and should work collaboratively with humans rather than simply automate human activity.

Thinking Machines was organized as a public-benefit corporation.

The company rapidly assembled one of the most sought-after research teams in Silicon Valley. Its ability to recruit prominent AI scientists became particularly notable during an era when companies including OpenAI, Meta, Google, Anthropic, and xAI were offering extraordinarily valuable compensation packages for leading researchers.

Thinking Machines experienced some high-profile departures during 2026 amid those talent wars, but the organization simultaneously expanded from several dozen founding employees to more than 150 people.

Tinker

Thinking Machines introduced its first product, Tinker, in October 2025.

Tinker is an API designed to make sophisticated AI model training and fine-tuning easier for researchers and developers. Instead of requiring users to build and manage enormous clusters of computing infrastructure themselves, Thinking Machines operates the underlying systems while customers control their training data and algorithms.

Early Tinker users included research groups at Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, and Redwood Research.

Thinking Machines initially launched the service in private beta before making it generally available in December 2025.

Tinker became an important first demonstration of Murati's strategy. Rather than launching another general-purpose chatbot directly against ChatGPT, the company began by creating infrastructure that allowed researchers and organizations to customize existing models.

Nvidia Partnership

In March 2026, Thinking Machines announced an enormous computing partnership with Nvidia.

Under the agreement, the company plans to deploy at least one gigawatt of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin computing systems. The infrastructure is intended to power frontier-model training and large-scale AI services.

Nvidia also made an additional investment in Thinking Machines. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The partnership aligned Murati with Jensen Huang, whose Nvidia chips became the fundamental computing infrastructure behind the generative-AI boom.

A gigawatt-scale deployment represents an extraordinary amount of computing capacity and places Thinking Machines among a relatively small group of companies capable of contemplating AI infrastructure on that scale.

Interaction Models

Murati has argued that conventional chatbots impose an unnatural structure on communication: the person speaks or types, stops, and then waits while the machine responds.

Thinking Machines introduced a research preview of "interaction models" in May 2026 designed to operate more like human conversation.

The system processes continuous streams of text, audio, and video while simultaneously generating responses. That allows an AI to react to interruptions, pauses, visual information, and changing context rather than requiring strictly alternating turns.

Murati described the technology as part of a broader effort to keep humans actively involved with increasingly capable AI systems instead of designing intelligence solely around autonomous agents.

Inkling

Thinking Machines took another major step in July 2026 with the release of Inkling, its first general-purpose open-weight AI model.

Inkling contains 975 billion total parameters, with 41 billion active at a time through a mixture-of-experts architecture. It can process text, images, and audio and supports a context window of up to one million tokens.

Unlike closed systems whose underlying model weights remain controlled by their creators, Inkling's weights can be downloaded and customized.

Thinking Machines subsequently introduced Inkling-Small, a smaller and more efficient version containing 276 billion total parameters.

The releases positioned Murati's company in the growing competition over whether advanced AI should primarily be distributed through closed proprietary systems or through models that developers can download, modify, and run themselves.

Recognition

Murati became one of the most visible women in the global technology industry during her OpenAI tenure.

Dartmouth awarded her an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 2024 in recognition of her contributions to artificial intelligence, engineering, and technology leadership.

She has also appeared on lists of influential technology executives and AI leaders published by organizations including "Time" and "Fortune."

Despite her prominence, Murati maintains a comparatively private public profile. She rarely discusses her personal relationships or family life and has focused most of her public appearances on engineering, artificial intelligence, and the long-term relationship between humans and increasingly capable machines.

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