OpenAI has repurchased roughly $7 billion of company stock from current and former employees, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that gives insiders a payday while keeping the company’s valuation steady and clearing a path toward a potential public listing.
The tender offer did not seek outside investors, the people said, a departure from earlier rounds in which OpenAI invited firms such as Thrive Capital and SoftBank to buy employee shares. The transaction values the AI company at $852 billion, in line with its most recent funding round, a choice that executives made deliberately, according to people familiar with the thinking. Startup Fortune, which tracks private-company financings, said the decision to hold the valuation flat rather than push it higher appears designed to lock in the loyalty of core employees ahead of an IPO, signaling stability to the market that will eventually price the stock.
For OpenAI’s employees, the buyback is the latest in a series of liquidity events that have made some of them quietly wealthy. The company has run share sales roughly every year since its first big tender offer in 2023, when it raised $6 billion in a round led by Thrive Capital. As the valuation has climbed from $29 billion to $157 billion and now to $852 billion, the company has repeatedly let employees cash out a portion of their holdings. What is different this time is the exclusivity: no new money, no new investors, no price discovery beyond the company’s own board. Current and former employees were offered the chance to sell at the same terms, according to the people familiar with the matter.
The internal-only structure carries real advantages for OpenAI. It avoids diluting the cap table with new investors at a moment when the company is negotiating future financing and, potentially, its IPO terms. It lets the board control the narrative around valuation, avoiding the awkward optics of a round priced above or below the previous one. And it rewards the people the company most needs to keep, researchers and engineers who are targets for deep-pocketed rivals, without the complexity of a broader transaction. Amazon and Microsoft, both large investors in OpenAI, were not involved in this round, the people said.
The buyback also signals how far OpenAI has traveled from its nonprofit origins. Founded in 2015 as a research nonprofit, the company later created a capped-profit structure to raise capital, then moved its commercial operations into a for-profit subsidiary that is now the entity employees hold equity in. The process of converting to a fully for-profit company, which began in earnest last year, has been one of the most scrutinized corporate restructurings in tech, with regulators in California and Delaware examining how the nonprofit’s assets would be valued. A public listing would complete that transformation, and people familiar with the company’s plans say an IPO is under active consideration, though no timeline has been set.
A listing of OpenAI would be among the largest technology offerings in history. At $852 billion, the company would enter the public market with a valuation larger than all but a handful of companies in the world, and its shares would become a proxy for the entire AI trade. Investment banks have jockeyed for years to win the mandate, and the company has been quietly building the financial-reporting machinery a public company requires. The buyback, analysts said, is the kind of housekeeping a board does when it wants the cap table clean, the employees satisfied and the story simple for the roadshow.
The risks are visible in the numbers. OpenAI loses money at scale, spending billions of dollars a year on compute, and its revenue, while growing quickly, depends on a small number of large customers. A public market that has punished unprofitable growth stories would demand answers about how long the losses last and whether the company’s model can defend its pricing against cheaper rivals. The $852 billion valuation assumes the company’s lead in frontier AI persists, an assumption competitors are spending tens of billions of dollars to test.
The buyback also gives the company’s founders and early backers a measure of flexibility. Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and holds a roughly 49% economic stake in its commercial arm, has been a patient holder, but its own investors have begun asking questions about how the AI relationship converts into returns. A cleaner cap table, with employee overhang reduced, makes that story easier to tell. The tender also simplified life for the company’s treasury team: with fewer employees holding large option positions, future financings and any eventual listing will face less pressure from insider selling in the early months of trading.
For now, the buyback accomplished its immediate purpose. Employees who have held equity through the company’s improbable rise now have cash in hand, and the ones who remain have a clearer picture of what their options are worth. The next liquidity event will look different: an IPO, with bankers, a roadshow and a price set by the market. Monday’s tender was the quiet version of that ritual. The runway to the public markets is now measured in months rather than years.
