OpenAI in talks to sell employee shares at $500 billion valuation: Bloomberg

ChatGPT creator OpenAI is in early discussions about a potential secondary share sale, which could value the company at around $500 billion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would allow current and former employees to sell shares, with the total sale expected to be worth several billion dollars.

Sources told Bloomberg that existing investors, including Thrive Capital, have approached OpenAI to buy shares from employees.

OpenAI’s previous $40 billion funding round, led by SoftBank, valued the company at $30 billion, placing it among the world’s most valuable private firms.


Secondary share sales like this are common in major US startups, helping to reward employees, retain talent, and bring in new investors. OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, hopes to use strong investor interest to give employees financial benefits that reflect the company’s rapid growth.

This development comes as OpenAI faces staff losses, with several researchers recently joining Meta. Meta has been aggressively hiring AI talent, including from Apple, Google and Microsoft, offering compensation packages reportedly reaching nine figures. A secondary share sale could help OpenAI retain key staff by providing them with a financial incentive to stay.

This also follows last week’s news that OpenAI secured $8.3 billion from a group of investors as part of the second tranche of its $40 billion funding round, which was reportedly oversubscribed by nearly five times.

In other news, OpenAI announced on Tuesday the release of two open-weight language models. These models are designed for advanced reasoning and are optimised to run on laptops, performing similarly to OpenAI’s smaller proprietary models.

The company is also preparing to launch its next flagship model, GPT-5, as it aims to maintain its leadership in the highly competitive AI space.