This is a good way to describe Fidji Simo’s story. She was born in Sète, a small town on the coast in the south of France. She was the first person in her family to finish high school, and she went on to get a management degree from HEC Paris and finish part of her program at UCLA. Eventually, she ran one of the most important product divisions in Silicon Valley. She was the CEO of Instacart when it went public on Nasdaq and one of the top leaders at OpenAI by the time she was 40. It only bends once, but that bend is important.
Simo said in July 2026 that she was leaving her full-time job at OpenAI and taking on a part-time advisory role instead. It wasn’t because of a disagreement about strategy or a better offer somewhere else. It was just sick. She was out of work for a few months because of what she called a severe flare-up of a condition she had been living with for seven years. It took longer and was more difficult than she thought it would be to get better, she wrote on social media. She had to give it her full attention. It’s easy to brush off that kind of statement, but consider this for a moment: a 40-year-old woman at the top of her field quit one of the world’s most watched companies because her health required it. That feels important.
Credit: Mark Hyman, MD
POTS stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. This is a neuroimmune condition that impacts circulation and can lead to severe symptoms such as heart rate spikes, dizziness, and constant tiredness. Simo has said that it took her three years of looking for a diagnosis to figure out what she was going through. She has said that this search was one of the reasons she helped to create the Metrodora Institute in 2021, a clinic and research center in Salt Lake City that focuses on neuroimmune disorders.
These are conditions that are often not diagnosed properly and affect women more than men. She also helped start ChronicleBio in 2025, a biotech company that wants to create an AI-powered data platform for conditions like Long COVID, ME/CFS, and POTS. These were not extra projects. They came from a real experience of being turned down by a medical system that didn’t know what to do.
Simo’s net worth has been estimated to be a wide range of amounts, depending on the source and the time. As of the middle of 2026, the number was estimated to be between $27 million and $88 million. The wide range was mostly due to the changing value of her Instacart equity.
A more common guess is that it will cost around $50 million. Most of what is known about her is related to her shares in Maplebear Inc., which is the parent company of Instacart. From 2021 to 2025, she was CEO of the company and led it through the slowdown after the pandemic, back to profitability, and the IPO under the ticker CART in September 2023, which ended what was called the longest tech IPO drought in 20 years. Those things aren’t small, and the pay that came with them showed that.
There is something interesting about the fact that she quit OpenAI at a time when the company was already having a rough time. A number of other senior executives, including the COO, the CMO, and others, had recently left or changed their jobs. It was also said that OpenAI was quietly getting ready for an eventual IPO.
Then Simo made his announcement, which seemed less like a change at work and more like a person making a really tough personal choice. It’s still not clear what her advisory role will entail or how involved she’ll stay in the work she helped build there, such as the launch of ChatGPT Health in January 2026, a product that links users’ medical records to personalized health support. That product, maybe more than anything else she worked on at OpenAI, had both professional and personal marks from her on it.
Fidji Simo’s career is too complicated to sum up in a few words, no matter what happens next. She made things. She got sick. She kept building things even though she was sick. That’s when she stopped for now. It wasn’t because she lost the drive, but because her body told her to.