OpenAI employees sell up to $30M in shares amid AI boom
A $6.6 billion secondary tender offer turned hundreds of OpenAI staffers into multimillionaires before the company even goes public.
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Add us on Google by Editorial Team May. 13, 2026Seventy-five OpenAI employees each cashed out the maximum allowed, $30 million, in a single secondary share sale. That’s not a typo, and it’s not stock options on paper. It’s real money, wired to real bank accounts, at a company that hasn’t held an IPO yet.
The October 2025 tender offer let more than 600 current and former employees sell shares totaling $6.6 billion. OpenAI’s valuation at the time of the sale sat at $852 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in history.
How the money broke down
The 75 employees who hit the $30 million cap accounted for $2.25 billion of the total. The remaining roughly 525 participants split approximately $4.35 billion, averaging around $8.3 million each.
This wasn’t a one-off event, either. OpenAI has been running secondary sales since 2021, and an estimated 300 to 500 employees have now realized more than $10 million each in secondary cash proceeds across multiple rounds.
Why secondary sales matter this much
Here’s the thing about working at a private company: your equity is basically Monopoly money until someone agrees to buy it. Stock options and restricted shares look great on a spreadsheet, but you can’t pay a mortgage with them. Secondary tender offers solve that problem by letting employees sell shares to outside investors before the company goes public.
For OpenAI, these sales serve a dual purpose. They keep employees happy and retained while also establishing a market-driven valuation for the company. The $852 billion price tag wasn’t set by some internal committee. It was set by investors willing to write very large checks.
The road to a trillion-dollar IPO
OpenAI’s trajectory suggests the October tender was just a warm-up. Projections place the company’s potential IPO valuation at over $1.5 trillion, which would nearly double the $852 billion mark from the tender.
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