OpenAI’s Sam Altman says his highly disciplined daily routine has “failed” — and now he enjoys relaxing weekends on a farm without cell phone service

As OpenAI prepares for the potential… IPO in the fourth quarter And Elon Musk’s xAI is fighting back Allegations of theft of trade secretsCEO Sam Altman is busy.

But these days, Altman, 40, takes things more slowly — at least on weekends — focusing on his family and scaling OpenAI.

Altman and his husband, Australian software engineer Oliver Mulherin, welcomed a son in February 2025. A year into parenthood, he says the experience is “not very publicized.”

“This has been my favorite thing in life so far,” Altman said. Forbes. “And I don’t think I have anything profound or corny to say about it, other than I thought it would be great and a lot better than I thought it would be.”

Fatherhood has come with many changes, including upending Altman’s disciplined daily routine. Before, in order to maximize his productivity, he focused on and made time for sleep, exercise, and nutrition, as he detailed in a 2018 report. Blog post. But now gone are the days of lifting weights and meditating three times a week.

“Now everything has fallen into nonsense,” he says. “I’ve just accepted that life is going to be messy for a few years.”

Altman has always been very vocal about prioritizing family and friends, saying that neglecting loved ones to be more productive is a “very stupid trade-off.” Fatherhood has sharpened this sense in him.

“The baseline that I have to beat myself at something to be willing to spend time on it is so huge now that most other things have fallen,” he said.

How does Sam Altman create work-life balance?

During the pandemic, Altman bought a $15.7 million ranch in Napa, California, where he spends weekends with Mulherin and their son, hiking without cell phone service. The farm grows wine grapes and raises livestock, although Altman has been a vegetarian since he was a child.

During the week, he’s back at work in San Francisco, where Altman lives in a $27 million house in Russian Hill. Being incredibly famous in the heart of Silicon Valley adds a complicated dynamic to being a parent. When he was at the park with his son, Altman would be stopped and pitch ideas for startups, attracting unwanted attention, he said.

“I ended up living in a strangely isolated world,” Altman says. “I fight it every inch. I think the more you allow the world to build a bubble around you, the crazier you get.”

Fame also began to limit Altman’s relationship with his son. He said he had been writing letters to his son about business challenges, but stopped when he realized they could be used as discovery in a lawsuit. The pages of OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman’s personal diary have become public as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company.

Altman often thinks about how different the world is for his son compared to when he was growing up in St. Louis.

“He’ll grow up and never know that there was a world, other than studying history, where every computer wasn’t smarter than he was,” he says. “People are wonderfully adaptable, so it won’t feel weird. It’ll be completely different.” Altman and Mulherin are expecting another child later this year.

“A lot of people said, ‘I’m so glad you had a baby, because I think you’ll make better decisions for all of humanity,'” Altman said. It was said before Bloomberg. “I really wanted to do it right before, and do my best. I still really want to, now.”

Altman says he’s not too concerned about how he’ll be remembered.

“If you die and people remember you, you won’t get any value out of it,” he said. “Maybe they’ll hear about me, maybe they won’t, but I will have done something that has improved the lives of others, and I will feel useful.”

This story originally appeared on Fortune.com