OpenAI reaches $500bn valuation via employee share sale

OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation through a secondary sale in which current and former employees sold roughly $6.6 billion of their own shares to a group of investors including SoftBank, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T. Rowe Price. Unlike a primary funding round, the proceeds went to the individual shareholders rather than to OpenAI’s own balance sheet — the transaction functioned as an employee liquidity event rather than fresh capital for the company.

The valuation more than doubled from roughly $300 billion, set in a primary funding round earlier that year, and made OpenAI the most valuable privately held company yet recorded, surpassing SpaceX. Analysts and reporters covering the deal noted that share sales of this kind, giving staff a way to realise value without an IPO, had become a retention tool for frontier labs competing for researchers against Meta’s large compensation offers and other well-funded rivals.

The pace of the increase — roughly $157 billion in an October 2024 round, $300 billion five months later, $500 billion within another seven months — drew scrutiny for resting on projected rather than current revenue, at a company that was still reportedly running at a substantial loss while spending heavily on compute commitments under Stargate and related infrastructure deals. The valuation had no direct link to a specific revenue or profit disclosure; it reflected what a small set of sophisticated investors were willing to pay for a limited pool of employee-held shares.