OpenAI, known for creating ChatGPT, has now passed Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the world’s most valuable startup. This comes after a major deal letting employees cash out shares at a whopping $500 billion company valuation.
According to a Bloomberg report, current and former OpenAI workers sold roughly $6.6 billion worth of shares to major investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price. An anonymous source familiar with the deal provided these details to Bloomberg.
The sale lifted OpenAI’s valuation well above the $300 billion it achieved earlier this year through a funding round led by SoftBank.
This sharp increase reflects the huge buzz from investors around AI pioneers like OpenAI and Nvidia. These firms are racing to construct massive data centers and roll out cutting-edge AI tools, a global effort projected to run into trillions of dollars.
Despite not being profitable so far, OpenAI is fueling this expansion with major deals, including partnerships with Oracle and South Korea’s SK Hynix.
The timing is perfect, as this puts OpenAI ahead of SpaceX’s $400 billion valuation during a major shift for the company. OpenAI is in discussions with Microsoft to move to a typical for-profit model.
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit aimed at creating AI that helps everyone, OpenAI intends to keep its original nonprofit in charge of a new public benefit corporation.
Both Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, have raised alarms about AI’s potential threats to humanity. But their partnership soured long ago: Musk, who quit the board in 2018, has filed a lawsuit to block the changes. He argues OpenAI ditched its core mission after taking billions from Microsoft in 2019, straying from its nonprofit roots.
On the business front, OpenAI is battling fierce rivalry for top AI experts as tech giants scramble for talent.
For instance, Meta has been snapping up researchers from OpenAI and other labs for its “superintelligence” squad, offering pay packages in the hundreds of millions.
This stock sale is a clever move by OpenAI to motivate its staff and resist those attractive job offers. It’s a standard practice for large U.S. startups to enable employee share sales.
It helps reward effort, retain skilled workers, and pull in fresh investment. In this case, OpenAI is capitalizing on strong investor demand to let employees benefit from the company’s rapid success with actual money.
As Bloomberg notes, the total shares sold in this secondary market deal were less than the over $10 billion in stock OpenAI had approved for sale, according to the anonymous source, who spoke privately because the info is confidential.
The source added that this could show current and former employees have a strong belief in the company’s future strength.
In the long run, OpenAI faces mounting competitive pressure from rivals such as Google and Anthropic, which are also raising capital at a rapid clip. To counter this, OpenAI has rolled out a series of new tech products in recent months.
These include two free, open-source AI models that imitate human reasoning skills. This came months after China’s DeepSeek drew worldwide notice for its similar open-source tool.
Bloomberg reports that OpenAI also unveiled its most advanced model, GPT-5, back in August to strengthen its position in the fast-growing AI field.
