In October of last year, OpenAI closed a secondary share sale which raised its valuation to 500,000 million dollars (Today it is already worth 852,000 million). This allowed employees to sell their shares, becoming multimillionaires even before the IPO.
6.6 billion. It is the total amount of the operation in which more than 600 employees, both current and former employees, benefited. In previous similar operations, OpenAI limited the maximum per person to 10 million, but in this case, due to high demand from investors, they decided to triple it to 30 million. Of all of them, 75 employees reached the maximum number, becoming multimillionaires in one fell swoop.
The AI winners. Uncertainty about the future profitability of AI continues to loom large, but that is not affecting workers in the most important AI laboratories. The case of the secondary sale of OpenAI is just one example of how AI engineers have become the biggest winners of this boom. Last summer, Meta offered up to $100 million to competing engineers and NVIDIA paid 900 million by an employee.
Tender offers. The usual thing when you started to work in a startup is that you received a low salary and a lot of shares, but you had to wait for the IPO to be able to make cash. This made many employees rich only on paper, but without real liquidity. A tender offer allows employees to get paid much sooner, allowing them to sell stakes to private investors. They count in the Wall Street Journal That this mechanism, which was previously a one-time thing, has become a central piece in Silicon Valley achieves a double effect: in addition to turning employees into millionaires in advance and thus retaining them to stay in the company, it helps to consolidate stratospheric valuations, causing each new operation to set a higher reference price for OpenAI shares.
The local impact. The rain of millions had an almost immediate consequence on the real estate market in San Franciscowhich is seeing prices rise even more. In February of this year the rents had increased by 14% compared to the same period in 2025 and the purchase prices of apartments and single-family homes rose by 12 and 23% respectively. At the same time, the sale of homes valued above $5 million has increased by 220%.
The AI gap. In the end, the AI boom is not only redefining which companies rule Silicon Valley (and the world), but also who can afford to live there. The combination of exorbitant valuations, tender offers billionaires and a stressed real estate market is turning AI engineers into a new urban aristocracy that, in practice, is redefining what it means to have a “good salary.” The income that a few years ago guaranteed access to the best neighborhoods is no longer enough today.
Image | Xataka with Gemini
In Xataka | Companies are turning their workers who know how to use AI into “stars”: the new labor gap
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