Open AI Has Already Created 300+ Decamillionaires. More Than a Decade of B2B IPOs Combined. Before Going Public. | Saa Str
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Open AI Has Already Created 300+ Decamillionaires. More Than a Decade of B2B IPOs Combined. Before Going Public.
by Jason Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, Saa Str. Ai
Per the WSJ, Open AI ran a tender offer last October. Over 600 current and former employees sold
That’s a single wealth event. No IPO. No acquisition. Just a secondary sale.
At least 75 confirmed $30M cashouts from this one transaction
Roughly 150 to 250 employees likely cleared $10M+ from this single tender (decamillionaire territory)
Cumulative across multiple Open AI tenders since 2021, the total population of employees with $10M+ in realized secondary cash is almost certainly 300 to 500+ people
This Amount of Pre-IPO Liquidity Has Never Happened in Tech Before
Google IPO’d in 2004 and made roughly 1,000 employees paper millionaires. They had to sit through lockups before any liquidity. Facebook IPO’d in 2012. Same pattern. Even the strongest B2B IPOs of the last decade (Snowflake, Mongo DB, Datadog, Hub Spot) produced a handful of decamillionaires after lockups expired, not hundreds.
The dot-com boom was even rougher. Hundreds of companies went public. Most employees couldn’t sell before lockups, and a meaningful percentage watched paper wealth evaporate when the bubble collapsed.
Open AI is still private. Its employees are getting $30M wires before any IPO. There’s no real precedent for this in modern tech history.
Open AI first issued shares in 2019. The latest financing round valued the company at $852 billion. Per WSJ reporting, employees from that era have seen their equity appreciate more than 100x.
For comparison, the Nasdaq composite roughly tripled in the same window.
A staff engineer who joined Open AI in 2019 with a market-rate package is now sitting on
Open AI isn’t the only AI lab minting decamillionaires. Anthropic completed its own tender in April 2026 at a
It came in below that. Investors wanted to buy more shares than employees were willing to sell.
That’s the opposite signal from Open AI. At Open AI, ~
Rough decamillionaire math for Anthropic from this tender: probably 100 to 200 people. Smaller than Open AI’s count, but the much bigger wealth event is still coming at IPO.
Two AI labs. Two different employee bets. Same direction. The largest concentrated wealth creation event in B2B history is happening across these companies right now, and it’s barely getting started.
The downstream effects are already visible everywhere in hiring:
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Comp inflation has no ceiling. Meta reportedly offered $300M packages to some top AI researchers last year. That number sounds fake until you realize Open AI’s top employees are sitting on equity worth multiples of that.
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The 2-year cliff is the real retention lever. Open AI required a 2-year wait before employees could participate in the tender. Anthropic and others have similar structures. This is the actual lock that drives retention now. Not vesting cliffs. Liquidity cliffs.
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The
500K, plus equity that’s functionally cash within 24 months. The compensation math for any B2B + AI startup trying to compete with them just broke. -
Founder economics no longer dominate. Greg Brockman testified Monday that he holds about $30 billion in equity. Sam Altman claims no shares but is likely to receive a stake in the for-profit conversion. Being a non-founder operator at one of the right AI labs now beats founder economics at most B2B companies. Read that sentence twice. It changes everything about hiring.
A few things to internalize if you’re building anything in B2B + AI right now:
Your top engineers have outside offers at $500K+ base, plus liquid equity. If you’re not in that range for AI/ML talent, you’re not in the market. Period.
Equity has to have a liquidity path, or it’s not “real” comp. The Open AI model of secondary tenders every 12 to 18 months is now table stakes for serious AI talent. “We’ll IPO eventually” stopped being a compelling answer two years ago.
The wealth is concentrated. A few hundred people at Open AI captured the bulk of these gains. The same pattern will hold at Anthropic, x AI, and a handful of others. Most B2B + AI startups will not produce wealth events at this scale, and recruits know it. Don’t oversell what you can’t deliver.
The flywheel is real. Hundreds of newly-minted decamillionaires in San Francisco are angel-investing, starting companies, and bidding up Bay Area real estate. The next wave of B2B + AI startups will be substantially funded by Open AI alumni capital. That’s already happening in early-stage rounds across SF.
WSJ’s reporting captures one snapshot of one tender. The forward-looking question is what happens when Open AI and Anthropic actually go public. Both are gearing up for what will likely be among the largest IPOs in history.
If 75 employees hit
Anthropic likely will do the same, and perhaps even IPO earlier.
The talent war for B2B + AI engineers is about to get more brutal, not less. Plan your comp, retention, and hiring strategy with that reality baked in.
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