Overview
- Average stock-based compensation for 2025 is about $1.5 million per employee across roughly 4,000 staff, according to the Wall Street Journal and Equilar.
- Investor documents indicate OpenAI expects to spend roughly $3 billion a year on stock compensation through 2030.
- The Wall Street Journal estimates stock-based pay could reach about 46% of 2025 revenue, compared with a typical pre-IPO level near 6% for large tech companies.
- OpenAI told employees it ended a six-month delay before equity begins vesting and issued one-off August bonuses to research and engineering teams after heavy recruiting pressure from rivals such as Meta.
- The company is advertising a senior Head of Preparedness role focused on AI risk with $555,000 in salary plus equity, a job Sam Altman described as stressful.