In the fiercest talent war Silicon Valley has ever seen, OpenAI is putting a historic amount of equity on the table.
According to The Information, the AI giant has earmarked an employee stock grant pool valued at $50 billion—equivalent to 10% of the company based on its October valuation.
📊 THE COMPENSATION MATH:
- The Pool: $50 Billion (just for grants).
- The Valuation: Based on a $500 Billion valuation mark set last fall.
- Total Employee Stake: When combining this new pool with the $80 billion in already vested equity, OpenAI employees reportedly hold ~26% of the company.
- The Upside: Reports from December suggest the company is already discussing a capital raise at a $750 billion valuation, which would instantly re-rate this compensation package by 50%.
⚔️ STRATEGIC CONTEXT: Why dilute investors by such a massive margin?
- Defense: With xAI raising billions to recruit engineers and Anthropic scaling rapidly, cash salary is no longer the differentiator. “Generational Wealth” equity is the only moat.
- The “Golden Handcuffs”: A 4-year vesting schedule on a grant of this size is designed to lock in the core researchers responsible for GPT-5 and Sora through the critical 2026-2027 window.
💡 ANALYST TAKEAWAY: To put this in perspective: OpenAI’s employee stock pool alone ($50B) is roughly the same size as the entire market cap of Ford or Kraft Heinz. This signals that Sam Altman views human capital—not compute—as the scarcest resource in the race to AGI.
👇 Founders & HR Pros: Is 26% employee ownership the new benchmark for “Deep Tech” startups, or is OpenAI an outlier that can’t be replicated?