On the eve of OpenAI IPO: 600 employees cash out $6.6 billion, 75 people receive the full $30 million

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The Wall Street Journal revealed that in an internal stock transaction last October, over 600 OpenAI employees cashed out a total of $6.6 billion, with 75 of them hitting the $30 million cap. President Greg Brockman holds shares valued at approximately $30 billion. Silicon Valley has never seen a private company create such a dense cluster of multi-millionaires before an IPO. (Previous coverage: WSJ: OpenAI misses user and revenue targets, CFO worries about inability to pay data center bills before IPO) (Background: OpenAI rumored to IPO as early as "end of this year" with a $1 trillion valuation; ChatGPT must capture more enterprise clients) OpenAI is rewriting the rules of wealth creation in Silicon Valley. In an internal stock transaction last October, over 600 current and former employees cashed out a total of $6.6 billion, with about 75 of them hitting the $30 million cap—the largest single employee stock sale in tech history. President Greg Brockman confirmed in court that his stake is worth approximately $30 billion. Silicon Valley has never seen a private company produce such a dense group of multi-millionaires before an IPO. According to the latest investigation by The Wall Street Journal, in an internal stock transaction completed last October, OpenAI allowed employees to sell up to $30 million in shares each. Over 600 current and former employees participated, cashing out a total of approximately $6.6 billion. Sources said about 75 of them hit the $30 million cap, setting a historical record for a single employee stock sale in the tech industry. OpenAI originally set the individual cash-out cap at $10 million. However, due to external investor demand far exceeding expectations, the company tripled the cap to $30 million last autumn. The transaction was completed at a $500 billion valuation, with investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, MGX from Abu Dhabi, and T. Rowe Price. According to previous CNBC reports, OpenAI initially planned a sale of about $6 billion, later expanded to $10.3 billion, but the final transaction was approximately $6.6 billion. The company interpreted the lower participation rate as a vote of confidence from employees in the long-term outlook. According to OpenAI's internal rules, employees can sell shares after two years of service. This means many employees who joined after the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 had their first opportunity to cash out options in this round. The value of OpenAI's stock has grown more than 100-fold over the past seven years. The wealth of top executives is even more staggering. According to NBC, OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman confirmed in court testimony on May 4 that his current stake in OpenAI is worth approximately $30 billion. This figure was revealed on the fourth day of the trial in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, repeatedly mentioned this figure during over two hours of questioning, asking why Brockman had not fulfilled his original pledge of a $100,000 donation while sitting on a $30 billion fortune. According to CNBC, Brockman admitted, "I did not ultimately make the donation, that is a fact." According to Fortune, Musk's legal team further revealed multiple financial ties between Brockman and CEO Sam Altman: Altman provided Brockman with approximately $10 million in equity from his family office back in 2017; Brockman also holds shares in AI chip startup Cerebras and nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, while OpenAI had discussed acquiring Cerebras, and Altman has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Helion. Musk's side argues that these cross-holdings undermine Brockman's independence as a fiduciary. Following the corporate restructuring completed last October, OpenAI employees collectively hold approximately 26% of the company's equity. StartupHub analysis points out that about 165 current and former employees hold a total of approximately $164.9 billion in equity, with an average paper wealth of about $1 billion per person, exceeding the total full-cycle returns of most venture capital funds. A joint analysis by The Wall Street Journal and data firm Equilar shows that OpenAI's per-capita stock compensation in 2025 is approximately $1.5 million, more than 7 times that of Google before its 2004 IPO, and 34 times the average level of 18 large tech companies in the year before their IPOs over the past 25 years. The company's equity incentive expenditure accounts for nearly half of its projected revenue, far exceeding peers such as Palantir, Meta, and Salesforce. On March 31 this year, OpenAI completed a $122 billion

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