He’s not just doing it for the love of the AI game anymore.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will receive up to $10.5 billion in equity in the company behind ChatGPT as part of a major restructuring plan, Reuters reported on Thursday.
The move comes a year after Altman told Congress he had “no equity” in OpenAI.
“I’m doing this because I love it,” he said in May 2023 while testifying before a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee on artificial intelligence oversight.
That answer was fairly misleading, however. While Altman didn’t have equity in OpenAI, he did own stock in Y Combinator … which owned stock in OpenAI, as The Guardian reported last month. Indirectly owning even a fraction of the shares in OpenAI — which has been looking to raise money at a $150 billion valuation — would’ve been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But that would be chump change to Altman now, anyway, with Bloomberg reporting he’ll get up to a 7% stake in the company, which, at a $150 billion valuation, would give him $10.5 billion in equity. Until now, Altman was being paid a $65,000 per year salary by OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015 with Elon Musk and several other tech entrepreneurs.
And he wasn’t exactly hurting for cash on that relatively modest Silicon Valley salary. Altman’s net worth is north of $2 billion thanks to investments in companies like Reddit, Pinterest and Instacart.
“If you want to get rich, remember that the way to do it is via equity, not salary,” Altman posted in 2020.
His $10.5 billion windfall would come as part of a fundamental shift in OpenAI’s business, with the company looking to restructure from a non-profit to a for-profit benefit corporation. Multiple key executives ditched the company this week, as news of its for-profit restructure came out.
Musk, who stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, has been critical of the company in recent years. He joked it should change its name to “ClosedAI” in March due to its move away from its initial mission: providing open source AI technology that benefits everyone. On Thursday, The X owner shared his displeasure with the news of OpenAI’s business restructuring.
“You can’t just convert a non-profit into a for-profit,” Musk posted. “That is illegal.”
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