OpenAI made 75 employees millionaires — no IPO required
OpenAI handed more than 600 current and former employees a rare chance to turn stock options into real money — without waiting for a public listing. The company completed a $6.6 billion secondary share sale in October 2025, valuing itself at $500 billion. Around 75 employees hit the maximum payout of $30 million each, becoming overnight multimillionaires while the company remains private.
The cashout
OpenAI had previously capped these secondary sales at $10 million per employee. It tripled that limit to $30 million in autumn 2025 — a deliberate move to keep researchers and engineers from jumping ship to Meta or Google. The higher ceiling meant even employees who joined after ChatGPT launched in late 2022 could lock in significant gains. Average stock-based compensation across the company now sits at $1.5 million per employee, per Fortune — the highest figure ever recorded for a tech startup, roughly six times what Google employees averaged before its 2004 IPO.
The talent war behind it
Meta and Google are offering nine-figure compensation packages to poach OpenAI's top researchers, reports CNBC. OpenAI's response is less about salaries and more about liquidity — giving staff a way to realize gains now rather than gambling on a future IPO that may or may not arrive. Silicon Valley IPO timelines have stretched dramatically over the past decade, meaning employee wealth increasingly gets created and cashed out before a company ever trades on a stock exchange. OpenAI is taking that trend further than any AI firm before it.
What it signals
Stock-based compensation now consumes roughly 50% of OpenAI's revenue, which raises real questions about whether this compensation model is sustainable long-term. For competitors — both in the US and in Europe — the pressure to match these packages is intense. No prior tech boom, not the dot-com era, not the smartphone wave, produced this level of pre-IPO wealth for ordinary employees at scale. The AI talent market has effectively forced private companies to build their own liquidity mechanisms rather than rely on public markets. For anyone outside OpenAI watching this unfold, the message is clear: the race for AI researchers has moved far beyond stock options and ping-pong tables.
