OpenAI Share Sale Makes Hundreds of Employees Multi-Millionaires
Behind the multibillion-dollar payout, OpenAI is confronting significant strategic and operational challenges.
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The surge in artificial intelligence and cloud computing has greatly benefited both corporations and AI startups. Currently, more than 600 OpenAI employees are experiencing these gains. In October 2025, OpenAI staff sold their stock holdings for a total of $6.6 billion in one day, with each employee receiving close to $11 million.
At OpenAI, employees with stock are required to wait two years before selling it. This was the first time many got the first opportunity to sell their shares since the launch of ChatGPT.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this marked one of the largest employee stock sales in the history of the technology industry. Employees were allowed to sell up to $30 million in shares each, letting roughly 75 walk away with the limit.
While all 600 of them technically became millionaires following the sale, not all of them chose to keep all the money. Several of them placed their remaining shares into donor-advised funds, which support philanthropic causes and allow them to claim tax deductions in the same financial year.
Apart from offering competitive salaries for technical roles—with annual salaries exceeding $500,000—the startup offers stock-based compensation that exceeds that of other major technology companies.
While Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, was reported to have an estimated $30 billion in them, CEO Sam Altman has none, owing to the company being structured as a nonprofit organization.
Despite the staggering stock sale, OpenAI is undergoing critical developments.
In April, the startup and Microsoft announced an amended agreement about their partnership, which included the longtime backer no longer paying a revenue share to OpenAI. Notably, revenue-share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft were to continue through 2030 at the same percentage, subject to a total cap.
Now, reports suggest that the two have agreed to cap their total revenue-sharing payments at $38 billion. The cap could support OpenAI’s stronger long-term pitch to investors as it moves toward a public offering later this year.
In another development involving the company, CFO Sarah Friar has raised concerns that the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough. The worries arose after revenue and user-growth estimates missed internal targets. This claim, however, has been refuted by both Altman and Friar. “We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” they told CNBC.
The renegotiated contract has paved the way for OpenAI to forge more partnerships with companies such as Amazon and Google.
