OpenAI Employees Have Cashed Out $3 Billion in Shares

My colleague Sri Muppidi broke the news Wednesday of OpenAI’s latest fundraising talks as it seeks to raise an unprecedented $40 billion. One previously unreported detail is that SoftBank bought about $240 million in shares from a small group of current and former employees this spring. 

That deal brought the total share sales by current and former employees to nearly $3 billion since 2021, an unusually large amount for a six-year-old business. That level is in the orbit of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has held employee share sales twice a year for the last two years, including a $1.25 billion sale in December, according to Caplight.