A planned tender offer—first reported in August and now largely executed—shows how secondary deals are reshaping Silicon Valley compensation, corporate control, and the AI supply chain.

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI employees—past and present—have pursued a secondary share sale totaling roughly $6 billion, with SoftBank Group among the anchor buyers, according to people familiar with the deal talks. The tender process, which surfaced publicly in mid‑August and has since culminated in sales totaling about $6.6 billion at a $500 billion valuation, marks one of the largest employee-liquidity events in the history of a venture‑backed startup. The transaction, alongside a separate primary fundraise earlier this year, places OpenAI at the center of an unprecedented capital wave into artificial intelligence.

The stock sale offers a window into how power and pay are being renegotiated across Silicon Valley. For rank‑and‑file engineers and researchers, secondary deals offer life‑changing liquidity without waiting for an IPO. For late‑stage investors, buying employee shares can be a way to secure exposure to a hot company that’s otherwise tightly allocated. And for management, tenders can be a tool for retention—an increasingly urgent priority as rivals bid up compensation to lure scarce AI talent.

SoftBank’s role is as strategic as it is financial. The Japanese conglomerate has spent the year re-gearing its balance sheet and leveraging Arm Holdings’ soaring stock to secure fresh lending capacity, signaling appetite for large AI bets. People familiar with the matter say SoftBank participated in the employee sale alongside Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and others—part of a broader web of relationships that includes cloud and semiconductor suppliers who depend on OpenAI’s appetite for compute.

In August, multiple outlets reported that OpenAI’s staff and alumni were preparing to sell about $6 billion in shares, a move that would push the company’s valuation toward $500 billion. In early October, sources said the sale was substantially completed at that price tag, lifting OpenAI’s paper worth above SpaceX and ByteDance and cementing its status as the world’s most valuable startup. The tranche allows eligible employees and early holders to convert options and restricted stock into cash while keeping their day‑to‑day roles.

The motivations are practical. OpenAI’s rapid expansion has dramatically increased compensation for top researchers, but much of that wealth sits locked up in equity with unpredictable liquidity windows. A well‑timed tender offer can fix that. At the same time, the company’s compute needs are scaling at a rate rarely seen in tech, demanding vast capital commitments from partners across chips, datacenters and energy. Investors who buy into secondary sales may gain not just financial upside but also commercial proximity to the AI supply chain.

This deal lands amid a spate of signals about OpenAI’s finances and operating scale. Industry reporting indicates that OpenAI’s revenue run‑rate accelerated through 2025 as enterprise demand for generative AI spread from pilots to production. Yet high training and inference costs continue to pressure cash flow, a tension that helps explain both the company’s aggressive primary fundraising and the willingness of investors to meet employees in the secondary market.

For SoftBank, the purchase deepens a multi‑pronged strategy to plant flags across the AI stack—from chips to robotics to developer tools—while using Arm’s equity as financial fuel. SoftBank’s margin‑loan talks this autumn, secured against Arm shares, underscored how central the chip designer has become to its plan. The group’s investment posture also reflects a bet that platform leaders like OpenAI will shape procurement across GPUs, networking, and power—categories where SoftBank‑backed companies seek to compete.

Employee tenders, however, are not without risks. Large secondary sales can complicate cap tables, raise questions about information symmetry, and stoke cultural rifts between those who sell and those who hold. They may also attract regulatory attention if they blur lines between primary financing and control‑shifting transactions. People close to the company say participation in the OpenAI sale was voluntary and capped, with allocations designed to spread liquidity without surrendering governance.

At a strategic level, the sale hints at how OpenAI is thinking about independence. The company remains closely tied to foundational partners—including cloud, hardware, and distribution giants—while preserving a dual‑structure that aims to balance its nonprofit charter with commercial ambitions. Secondary liquidity can help keep key contributors inside that tent, even as competitors pitch outsized pay packages and bespoke research labs to woo them away.

The next chapter turns on delivery. Customers are testing new model families; governments are drafting guardrails; and the capital cycle is oscillating between exuberance and caution. Whether this tender ultimately looks prescient or frothy will depend less on headline valuation than on how effectively OpenAI converts research breakthroughs into durable, cash‑generating products—and how the broader ecosystem resolves bottlenecks in chips, power and talent.

For now, the numbers tell a simple story: billions in employee liquidity, a half‑trillion‑dollar price tag, and a consortium of blue‑chip investors willing to underwrite both. In the annals of startup finance, few secondary sales have carried this much strategic weight—or said as much about where the AI economy is headed.

Sources

– Reuters, Oct. 2, 2025: OpenAI hits $500 billion valuation following ~$6.6B employee share sale.

– Reuters, Aug. 15, 2025: OpenAI staff looking to sell ~$6B in stock to SoftBank, Thrive, Dragoneer.

– Financial Times, Oct. 2025: OpenAI overtakes SpaceX after hitting $500bn valuation via secondary sale.

– Bloomberg, Oct. 2, 2025: OpenAI completes share sale at $500B valuation.

– Yahoo Finance / Reuters, Oct. 1, 2025: Employees sold shares to investors including SoftBank, Thrive, Dragoneer, MGX, T. Rowe Price.

– The Information, Sept. 29, 2025: OpenAI first‑half 2025 revenue context.