$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
That’s how it should be, spread the wealth.
Spreading illiquid wealth *
OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
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Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#22$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
if Meta is throwing 10s of million at hot AI staffers, than 1.6M average stock comp starts looking less insane, a lot of that may also have been promised at a lower valuation given how wild OpenAI's valuation is.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#23Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#24> US$2.5 billion on stock-based compensation um...
Never having worked for a company in a position like OpenAI, how does this manifest in the real world as actual comp? Like I get 50,000 shares deposited in to my Fidelity account, worth $2 each, but i can't sell them or do anything with them?
In my experience owning private stock, you basically own part of a pool. (Hopefully the exact same classes of shares as the board has or else it's a scam.) The board controls the pool, and whenever they do dividends or transfer ownership, each person's share is affected proportionally. You can petition the board to buy back your shares or transfer them to another shareholder but that's probably unusual for a rank-and-file employee.
The shares are valued by an accounting firm auditor of some type. This determines the basis value if you're paying taxes up-front. After that the tax situation should be the same as getting publicly traded options/shares, there's some choices in how you want to handle the taxes but generally you file a special tax form at the year of grant.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#25These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
There is an exceptionally obvious solution for OpenAI & ChatGPT: ads.
In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT.
One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer.
Ads are a hyper margin product that are very well understood at this juncture, with numerous very large ad platforms. Meta has a soon to be $200 billion per year ad system. There's no reason ChatGPT can't be a $20+ billion per year ad system (and likely far beyond that).
Their path to profitability is very straight-forward. It's practically turn-key. They would have to be the biggest fools in tech history to not flip that switch, thinking they can just fund-raise their way magically indefinitely. The AI spending bubble will explode in 2026-2027, sharply curtailing the party; it'd be better for OpenAI if they quickly get ahead of that (their valuation will not hold up in a negative environment).
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#26The news about how much money Nvidia is investing just so that OpenAI can pay Oracle to pay Nvidia is especially concerning - we seem to be arriving at the financial shell games phase of the bubble.
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Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#27$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
They have to compete with Zuckerberg throwing $100M comps to poach people. I think $830k per person is nothing in comparison.
Both numbers are entirely ludicrous - highly skilled people are certainly quite valuable. But it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally. The 50x developer is a pervasive myth in our industry and it's one that needs to be put to rest.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#28These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
they could keep the current model in chatGPT the same forver and 99% of users wouldnt know or care, and unless you think hardware isnt going to improve, the cost of that will basically decrease to 0.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s how it should be, spread the wealth.
Spreading illiquid wealth *
They’ve had multiple secondary sales opportunities in the past few years, always at a higher valuation. By this point, if someone who’s been there >2 years hasn’t taken money off the table it’s most likely their decision.
I don’t work there but know several early folks and I’m absolutely thrilled for them.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#30These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
The real answer is in advertising/referral revenue. My life insurance broker got £1k in commission, I think my mortgage broker got roughly the same. I’d gladly let OpenAI take the commission if ChatGPT could get me better deals.
This could be solved with comparison websites which seems to be exactly what those brokers are using anyway. I had a broker proudly declare that he could get me the best deal, which turned out to be exactly the same as what moneysavingexperts found for me. He wanted £150 for the privilege of searching some DB + god knows how much commission he would get on top of that...