OpenAI reaches $500 billion valuation
An employee share sale pushes OpenAI past SpaceX as the most valuable private company. The deal brings in no new capital but lets employees cash out part of their holdings.
OpenAI has reached a valuation of $500 billion through a $6.6 billion employee share sale. The deal puts the creator of ChatGPT ahead of SpaceX as the world’s most valuable private company, although the money does not go into the company’s coffers.
The figure reflects investors’ appetite for a stake in OpenAI, as well as the pressure to retain its specialists. In just a few months, its implied valuation has climbed from $300 billion to $500 billion, an increase of nearly 67%.
A sale between shareholders, not a new funding round
The transaction is a secondary sale: current and former employees are selling some of their shares or options to other investors. OpenAI had authorized up to $10.3 billion in shares, but $6.6 billion worth were ultimately sold, according to Bloomberg.
The buyers include SoftBank, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, T. Rowe Price and MGX. Several had already participated in the up-to-$40 billion funding round announced in March, which valued OpenAI at $300 billion.
The distinction matters. OpenAI has not just raised $6.6 billion to pay for data centers, salaries or research. The cash goes to the people who held the stakes. The $500 billion valuation is derived from the price accepted in that private transaction.
Nor does it mean the entire company could be sold tomorrow for that amount. In a privately held company, there are fewer transactions, less transparency and far more limited liquidity. Even so, the price serves as a benchmark for what major investors are willing to pay to acquire a stake in the company.
OpenAI moves ahead of SpaceX
SpaceX was valued at around $400 billion in an earlier secondary transaction. The new price of OpenAI’s shares puts Sam Altman’s company ahead of Elon Musk’s space company and other private giants such as ByteDance.
The jump is particularly striking because OpenAI is still spending far more than it brings in. Financial documents cited by The Information put its revenue in the first half of 2025 at $4.3 billion, with $2.5 billion in cash burn over the same period.
The company needs resources to train models and, above all, to run them at scale. OpenAI has committed to a cloud-services deal with Oracle worth around $300 billion over five years. Nvidia also announced in September that it intends to invest up to $100 billion over time, tied to the deployment of at least 10 gigawatts of computing infrastructure for OpenAI.
Against those obligations, the $500 billion figure expresses an expectation: that ChatGPT, its enterprise services, its API and products such as Sora can become businesses capable of justifying investments on a scale previously reserved for the largest publicly traded tech companies.
Liquidity to retain researchers
The secondary sale also serves as a retention tool. Shares in a private company can be highly valuable on paper, but their owners cannot always sell them. Opening a liquidity window allows employees and former workers to turn part of that compensation into cash without waiting for an IPO.
That incentive comes after Meta poached at least seven prominent OpenAI specialists over the summer to strengthen its new superintelligence organization. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has used multimillion-dollar compensation packages to compete for researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other labs.
Corporate reorganization remains unresolved
The deal also comes as OpenAI and Microsoft negotiate the company’s future structure. In September, the two parties announced a preliminary, nonbinding agreement that paves the way for reorganizing the business as a for-profit entity, while the nonprofit organization would retain control.
That transformation remains subject to final agreements and regulatory review. Its outcome will determine the economic rights of Microsoft, employees and other investors, as well as OpenAI’s ability to continue raising the enormous amounts of capital its infrastructure requires.
The next test will not be another valuation figure, but whether that investor enthusiasm can be converted into enough revenue to support computing contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Until then, the sale provides liquidity to employees without forcing OpenAI to go public or yet subject itself to the financial scrutiny of public markets.
