The valuation of OpenAI has surged to $500 billion after employees and early investors sold $6.6 billion worth of stock to a group of global backers.
The transaction makes OpenAI the most valuable private company in the world, surpassing Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is valued at $456 billion.
The deal was structured as a secondary sale, allowing staff and former insiders to cash out without the company going public. OpenAI had authorised up to $10.3 billion in stock sales, but only two-thirds were sold. Internally, this limitation is seen as a sign that many employees trust the company’s long-term prospects.
The investor mix also reveals the scale of interest in OpenAI’s growth. Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price all bought into the round. SoftBank had already backed OpenAI in its $40 billion primary funding earlier this year, making this a reinforcement of its position.
Financially, the company is growing at a speed that few in Silicon Valley have matched. In the first half of 2025, OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue, already 16% higher than its full-year revenue for 2024.
That growth has pushed the company into a league where it stands at the forefront of artificial intelligence and also sits at the centre of the global technology economy.
Alongside the capital raise, OpenAI is also exploring structural changes. Reports reveal the company is in talks with Microsoft to transition into a public benefit corporation. If completed, OpenAI’s nonprofit board would retain governance power, while its commercial arm would continue expanding at scale.
The timing of the share sale shows high competition for talent across the sector. Meta has gone as far as offering nine-figure compensation packages and recently hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, to head its new superintelligence unit.
For OpenAI, the secondary sale does more than unlock employee liquidity. It functions as a retention strategy, a way to keep top engineers and researchers from defecting to rivals. Other high-value private companies such as Stripe, Databricks, and SpaceX have adopted similar tactics.
With this new valuation, Analysts say OpenAI has shown it can translate massive infrastructure and talent into recurring revenue streams. Billions already flow in and product adoption is growing continuously, hence, OpenAI now looks less like a risky investment and more like an indispensable pillar of the modern technology economy.
