OpenAI's $7B employee stock sale deepens SF's absurd AI wealth divide

OpenAI just closed a roughly $7 billion tender offer that let current and former employees sell shares at the company’s towering $852 billion valuation, per Bloomberg. This is the second such liquidity event in a year — a $6.6 billion buyback last October saw about 75 employees cash out up to $30 million each. For a company that keeps pushing back its IPO, these sales are the pressure valve keeping restless talent from walking.

The March funding round that birthed this buyback raised $122 billion at the same $852 billion valuation, which puts OpenAI in a strange limbo: private-company cash flows with public-company scrutiny. Employees are getting rich on paper, but without a clear path to the public markets, the tender offers are the only way to turn that paper into actual money. It’s a peculiar kind of golden handcuff — you’re a multimillionaire who can’t fully liquidate.

But the money spilling out of these deals doesn’t stay confined to Cap Tables. In San Francisco, AI compensation is warping the city’s already brutal housing market. Rents are climbing so aggressively that even engineers pulling top-of-market salaries are getting squeezed out of apartments. The numbers are surreal: some wealthy AI families now enroll their kids in private schools with an AI-focused curriculum that charges up to $75,000 a year. That’s not a typo.

What we’re watching is the creation of a parallel economy funded by private market liquidity. The last buyback minted dozens of deca-millionaires overnight. This one is three times the size. The wealth isn’t theoretical — it’s bidding up real estate, funding boutique schools, and widening the gap between the AI haves and everyone else in the city. Sam Altman’s company might not be public yet, but its financial gravity is already reshaping a city in real time.