In the Silicon Valley of the past, for ordinary employees to get rich, there was usually only one path: wait for the company to go public.

But OpenAI is rewriting that rule.
Last October, OpenAI completed an internal employee stock sale:
Number of participants: 600+ current and former employees
Total cash-out: $6.6 billion
Individual cap: up to $30 million worth of shares (the original cap was $10 million—tripled directly)
Insiders say that about 75 people directly took the full $30 million top-tier limit.
This is the largest single employee stock sale event in the tech industry to date.
But the cash-out was only part of the people—more others chose to keep holding.
Last year, OpenAI carried out a corporate restructuring, transforming from a nonprofit organization into a for-profit company.
After the transition, about 165 current and former employees collectively held 26% of the company’s equity, corresponding to about $164.9 billion.
Paper wealth per person is about $1 billion, exceeding the total returns of most venture capital funds across their entire life cycle.
According to OpenAI, its per-capita stock compensation in 2025 is about $1.5 million—7 times that of Google before its 2004 IPO, and 34 times the average level of 18 major tech companies in the past 25 years before they went public.
Multiple media reports say OpenAI is preparing to launch an IPO in Q4 2026, with a target valuation that could reach $1 trillion.
In Silicon Valley history, no private company has ever, prior to going public, created such a dense cluster of millionaires on the eve of an IPO.