Last October, more than 600 current and former OpenAI employees collectively cashed out $6.6 billion in company shares — the most lucrative pre-IPO payday in tech history.
The windfall came through a single tender offer that allowed employees to sell up to $30 million worth of shares each. About 75 of them hit that ceiling. Some donated their remaining equity to charitable funds, locking in tax deductions while committing the money to philanthropic causes.
The sale was the first opportunity many post-ChatGPT hires had ever had to sell — OpenAI requires a two-year holding period before employees can cash out. For those who joined after the 2022 launch, it was also a glimpse of what's coming: OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to stage some of the largest IPOs in history, and thousands of rank-and-file workers stand to become multimillionaires when they do.
No previous tech boom has generated this scale of wealth for employees before a public listing. During the dot-com era, workers typically had to wait through a prolonged lockup even after an IPO — and many watched the bubble burst before they could ever sell. Today's AI employees aren't waiting that long.
The compensation figures are staggering by any measure. Meta offered select researchers $300 million packages last year. OpenAI pays some technical staff over $500,000 in base salary, distributes unusually large stock grants, and handed out million-dollar one-time bonuses last August. Employees who received shares when the company first issued equity seven years ago have seen their value grow more than 100-fold — a return that dwarfs the Nasdaq's roughly 3x gain over the same period.
The wealth is already reshaping San Francisco, pushing up rents and deepening anxieties about inequality. Some top earners have pledged significant donations to charity. Others — rank-and-file workers who never expected a life-changing sum — are still processing what happened.
At the executive level, the numbers grow almost abstract. OpenAI President Greg Brockman disclosed equity worth roughly $30 billion in court testimony this week. CEO Sam Altman, who has said he holds no shares due to the company's nonprofit origins, may yet receive equity depending on the outcome of his ongoing legal dispute with Elon Musk over OpenAI's restructuring.
The lottery ticket, it turns out, was the job offer.