OpenAI’s reported plans to pursue an IPO later this year could be a massive windfall—not just for investors betting on the AI boom, but for the company’s own employees.
The ChatGPT maker’s average stock-based compensation hit a whopping $1.5 million among its roughly 4,000 employees in 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal. With a reported $830 billion valuation from its latest funding round, the company ranks among the most valuable private firms ever. An IPO at or near that level could turn thousands of employees into multimillionaires.
This unprecedented employee equity sharing is the highest of any major tech startup in recent history.
The next closest example is when Google went public in the early 2000s. Its average stock compensation was about a quarter of a million dollars (when adjusted for inflation)—about one-sixth of OpenAI’s current standing.
With AI rivals such as Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, and Google all aggressively looking to poach top tech talent capable of building next-generation AI models at scale, OpenAI’s equity strategy appears to be rooted in retention. Nearly half, about 46.2%, of OpenAI’s annual revenue is going toward providing stock-based compensation, underscoring just how fierce the war for AI talent has become.
