OpenAI's stock-based compensation (equity compensation) reached an average of $1.5 million per employee in 2025, writes The Wall Street Journal.
Illustrative image: BlackJack3D / Getty Images
According to financial data OpenAI showed investors, the company is paying its employees more than any tech startup in recent history.
Stock-based compensation at the company amounts to about $1.5 million per employee on average across its roughly 4,000-person workforce.
This is more than seven times the level of equity compensation Google disclosed in 2003, before filing for its initial public offering in 2004.
The $1.5 million figure is approximately 34 times the average employee compensation of 18 other major tech companies in the year before their market debut, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on data collected by Equilar.
The analysis considered major tech IPOs over the past 25 years.
Stock-based compensation (per employee) pre-IPO in 2025, adjusted for inflation among major tech companies that went public since 2000. Sources: Company information provided to investors (OpenAI metrics); Equilar (all others) / WSJ Infographic
To maintain its lead in the artificial intelligence race, OpenAI is distributing massive equity compensation packages to leading researchers and engineers, making them among the wealthiest employees in Silicon Valley. These ownership awards add to the company's significant operating losses and rapidly dilute the stakes of existing shareholders.
As the AI arms race intensified this summer, cutting-edge labs like OpenAI faced pressure to increase employee pay after
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg began offering compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and in some rare cases up to $1 billion — to top executives and researchers at competing companies.
Zuckerberg's recruiting drive led to more than 20 OpenAI employees moving to Meta, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengzhao Zhao. In August, OpenAI paid out a one-time bonus to some of its research and engineering staff, with some receiving millions of dollars.
Financial data shared by the company with investors this summer indicates that OpenAI's equity compensation is expected to increase by approximately $3 billion annually until 2030.
The company recently informed employees that it would discontinue a policy that required them to work at OpenAI for at least six months before their equity began to vest. This could lead to a further increase in compensation.
OpenAI's compensation as a percentage of revenue is expected to reach 46% in 2025 — the highest among all 18 companies, with the exception of Rivian, which did not generate revenue in the year before its IPO.
According to the analysis, Palantir's stock-based compensation accounted for 33% of revenue in the year before its 2020 IPO, Google's was 15%, and Facebook's was 6%. On average, according to Equilar data, this form of compensation amounted to about 6% of revenue for tech companies in the year before their IPOs.
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