OpenAI let more than 600 current and former employees sell a combined $6.6 billion in stock during an October 2025 tender offer, according to The Wall Street Journal. About 75 of them cashed out the maximum $30 million each, accounting for roughly $2.25 billion of the total. A tender offer lets workers at a private company sell shares to investors pre-IPO. OpenAI has run several in recent years, but this one was the largest by a wide margin.
Strong outside demand pushed OpenAI to triple its per-employee cap from $10 million to $30 million ahead of the sale. The company said the old limit frustrated senior researchers and engineers who were eligible to sell more. Reported buyers included Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX and T. Rowe Price. The deal also delivered a first taste of liquidity for many staff, since OpenAI bars employees from selling shares during their first two years. That rule shut out workers who joined after ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
Estimates of OpenAI’s valuation at the time of the sale vary, ranging from about $400 billion to $500 billion depending on the source. Six months later, in March 2026, the company closed a $122 billion primary round at an $852 billion valuation, the largest ever recorded for a private company. Early staff have gained the most. Employees who joined in 2019, when OpenAI formed its for-profit subsidiary, have seen their stock grow more than 100-fold. President Greg Brockman testified last week that his stake is worth about $30 billion. CEO Sam Altman says he holds no shares, citing the nonprofit roots, though some investors expect that to change if he prevails in his court fight with Elon Musk over the restructuring.
What It Means
- The payout reads as much as a retention tool as a reward. Rivals including Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI and Meta have dangled nine-figure packages to poach OpenAI talent.
- A $30 million cash check is harder to walk away from than unvested equity at a competitor.
- Some sellers who hit the cap moved leftover shares into donor-advised funds, charitable accounts that lock money away while granting a same-year tax deduction.
- The sale signals deep private-market demand for OpenAI stock without a public listing.
Industry Backdrop
The cashout previews a larger wave. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to pursue some of the biggest IPOs ever, and some projections put a future OpenAI listing above $1.5 trillion. Either would create thousands more multimillionaires. Pay across the sector has climbed sharply. Last year Meta offered some top AI researchers packages worth up to $300 million each. OpenAI lists base salaries above $500,000 for certain technical roles and issued one-time bonuses worth millions last August. The trend marks a shift from the dot-com era, when many employees were locked into post-IPO holding periods and watched paper fortunes vanish before they could sell.
