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OpenAI IPO Eve: Over 600 Employees Cash Out $6.6 Billion, Silicon Valley's New Wealthy Elite Emerging

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In Silicon Valley's history, never has a pre-IPO company created such a dense group of millionaires.

Original Title: "OpenAI's Largest-Ever Internal Wealth Creation: 600 Employees Cash Out $6.6 Billion, with 75 Taking the Full $30 Million"

TechCrunch Summary: The Wall Street Journal has exposed the scale of wealth creation within OpenAI. In a stock sale event last October, the company raised the individual cash-out limit from $10 million to $30 million, with over 600 current and former employees participating, collectively cashing out $6.6 billion, with approximately 75 individuals taking the maximum cash-out amount.

CEO Brockman confirmed in court this week that his stake is valued at around $30 billion. Silicon Valley has never seen a pre-IPO company create such a dense group of multi-millionaires.

In the past in Silicon Valley, the typical path for an ordinary employee to strike it rich was to wait for the company to go public. OpenAI is rewriting this rule.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in a stock sale event completed last October, OpenAI allowed employees to sell up to $30 million in shares each, with over 600 current and former employees participating, collectively cashing out around $6.6 billion. Sources revealed that approximately 75 individuals took the full $30 million maximum amount. This is the largest single employee stock sale event in the tech industry to date.

Cash-Out Limit Tripled, External Investor Demand Boosted Amount

OpenAI originally set a $10 million cash-out limit for employees. However, due to external investor demand far exceeding expectations, the company tripled the limit to $30 million last fall.

This transaction was completed at a $500 billion valuation, with investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price, among others. According to previous CNBC reports, OpenAI initially planned to sell around $6 billion, later expanding to $10.3 billion, but the final actual transaction amounted to approximately $6.6 billion. Internally, the lower participation rate was seen as employees voting with confidence in the long-term outlook.

Under OpenAI's rules, employees can sell shares after two years of tenure. This means many employees who joined after the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 had their first opportunity to exercise their stock options in this round of trading. The value of OpenAI's stock has grown more than 100 times in the past seven years.

Brockman Court Confirms Holdings Valued at $30 Billion, Musk's Lawyer Presses on

The scale of wealth in the hands of executives is even more astounding. According to NBC, Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI, confirmed in court testimony on May 4 that his current stake in OpenAI is valued at around $30 billion.

This figure was revealed during the fourth day of the Musk v. OpenAI trial. Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, repeatedly referred to this number during over two hours of questioning, pressing Brockman on why he had not fulfilled his initial commitment of a $100,000 donation, yet possessed a $30 billion fortune. According to CNBC, Brockman admitted, "I indeed did not make the final donation, that is a fact."

Fortune reported that Musk's legal team also unveiled multiple layers of financial ties between Brockman and CEO Sam Altman: Altman had provided Brockman with equity in his family office worth around $10 million as early as 2017; Brockman also holds stakes in AI chip startup Cerebras and fusion energy company Helion Energy, with OpenAI having discussed acquiring Cerebras, and Altman having invested hundreds of millions in Helion. Musk's side argues that these cross-holdings compromised Brockman's independence as a trustee.

Employee Ownership at 26%, Per Capita Paper Wealth Exceeds Most VC Fund Total Returns

Following a company reorganization completed in October last year, OpenAI employees collectively hold around 26% of the company's equity.

According to StartupHub's analysis, approximately 165 current and former employees collectively hold equity worth around $164.9 billion, with an average per-person paper wealth of around $1 billion, surpassing the total returns of most venture capital funds.

As per The Wall Street Journal and data firm Equilar's analysis, OpenAI's per-capita stock compensation in 2025 is around $1.5 million, more than 7 times that of Google's before its 2004 IPO, and 34 times the average for the 18 major tech companies in the year before their IPO over the past 25 years.

The company's stock-based compensation expense accounts for nearly half of the expected revenue, far exceeding peers such as Palantir, Meta, and Salesforce.

$852 Billion Valuation, Trillion-Dollar IPO on the Horizon, Wealth Creation Machine Far From Stopping

On March 31st of this year, OpenAI achieved a valuation of $852 billion and completed a $122 billion financing round, setting a new record for the largest single-round private funding in Silicon Valley history. Amazon led the investment with $500 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank invested $300 billion each. The company currently has a monthly revenue of $20 billion, with over 9 billion ChatGPT weekly active users and over 50 million paid subscribers.

According to multiple media reports, OpenAI is preparing to launch an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a target valuation that may reach $1 trillion. If successful, this would be one of the largest tech company IPOs in history. CFO Sarah Friar previously stated at Davos that the company plans to allocate a portion of the IPO shares to retail investors.