OpenAI’s Pay Tops That Of Any Recent Tech Startup

BY BERBER JIN, NATE RATTNER AND BRADLEY OLSON

OpenAI is paying employees more than any tech startup in recent history, according to financial data it has shown investors.

The company’s stock-based compensation is about $1.5 million an employee, on average, across its workforce of roughly 4,000.

That is more than seven times higher than the stockbased pay Alphabet’s Google disclosed in 2003, before it filed for an initial public offering in 2004. The $1.5 million is about 34 times the average employee compensation of 18 other large tech companies in the year before they went public, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data compiled by Equilar. The analysis reviewed major tech IPOs over the last 25 years.

The compensation figures have been adjusted into 2025 dollars to account for inflation.

An OpenAI spokesman declined to comment.

To keep its lead in the AI race, OpenAI is doling out massive stock compensation packages to top researchers and engineers, making them some of the richest employees in Silicon Valley. The equity awards are inflating the company’s heavy operating losses and diluting existing shareholders at a rapid clip.

As an AI arms race intensified this summer, frontier labs

such as OpenAI faced pressure to increase employee pay after Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg began offering pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars— and in some rare cases $1 billion—to top executives and researchers at rivals.

Zuckerberg’s recruiting blitz swept up 20-plus OpenAI personnel, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao. In August, OpenAI gave some of its research and engineering staff a one-time bonus, with some employees receiving millions of dollars, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The financial data, shared with investors over the summer, show that OpenAI’s stock-based compensation was expected to increase by about $3 billion annually through 2030.

The company recently told staff it would discontinue a policy that required employees to work at OpenAI for at least six months before their equity vests. That development could lead to further compensation increases.

OpenAI’s compensation as a percentage of revenue was set to reach 46% in 2025, the highest of any of the 18 companies except for Rivian , which didn’t generate revenue the year before its IPO. Palantir ’s stock-based compensation equaled 33% of its revenue the year before its initial public offering in 2020, Google’s was 15% and Facebook’s was 6%, the analysis shows.

On average, each company’s stock-based compensation made up about 6% of revenue among tech companies the Journal analyzed in the year before their IPO, according to the Equilar data.

News Corp, owner of the Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.