Just in time for the holidays: Roughly 400 current and former OpenAI employees are set to receive multi-million dollar paydays thanks to a special stock sale the privately-held San Francisco company has arranged with Japan's SoftBank Group.
The tender offer allows certain OpenAI employees and former staffers to sell their stock to SoftBank at $210 per share, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The transaction opens an important avenue for insiders to cash out some of the equity they have locked up in the AI company, whose valuation has doubled over the past year to $157 billion.
SoftBank plans to purchase up to $1.6 billion worth of stock from eligible shareholders, who must have been issued restricted stock units more than two years ago in order to participate, the source said. Eligible OpenAI shareholders have until December 24 to decide if, and how much, they want to sell. SoftBanks' tender offer was first reported by CNBC in November, but the number of eligible participants and eligible shares has not been known until now. OpenAI currently has more than 2,000 employees.
For those eligible, the deal could make for a welcome holiday bonus. Each participant will be allowed to sell as much as $10 million worth of vested stock. Current OpenAI employees will receive preference over former employees in the event that the deal is oversubscribed, according to the source. All eligible current employees will be able to cash out the maximum amount of $10 million per person. But, depending on how many people participate, former employees may not be able to sell the full $10 million of equity, though they will be assured the ability to cash out at least $2 million of stock, per OpenAI's rules.
According to the source, OpenAI has said that the total amount of stock eligible for sale is worth $2 billion. Since SoftBank has agreed to purchase $1.6 billion, that leaves as much as $400 million worth of stock potentially without a buyer.
For SoftBank, the deal is an opportunity to bolster its stake in OpenAI, after reportedly investing $500 million in OpenAI's $6.6 billion fundraising round in October, led by Thrive Ventures. The current tender offer's $210 per share price aligns with the $157 billion valuation that OpenAI fetched during the October fundraising.
SoftBank, led by billionaire founder and CEO Masayoshi Son, is generally making big bets in the AI space: Yesterday Son and President-elect Donald Trump announced plans for SoftBank Group to invest $100 billion in AI infrastructure projects in the U.S. over the next four years.
OpenAI has loosened the rules for this tender offer, after drawing criticism over previous offerings that made it more difficult for former employees to participate, and which penalized former employees who had joined competitors. OpenAI told employees in June that it had “changed its policies toward secondary share sales to allow current and former employees to participate equally in its annual tender offers," CNBC reported at the time. With fewer tech companies listing shares on the public markets, tender offers have become increasingly important for tech workers who are typically compensated with a significant portion of equity.
One interesting wrinkle to the current tender offer is the potential for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei, and head of policy Jack Clark to sell any OpenAI shares they own. The trio, who left OpenAI in 2021 to found competitor Anthropic, would seemingly meet the criteria to participate in the tender offer. Anthropic, which recently raised $4 billion from Amazon, declined to comment on whether any of its employees are participating in the OpenAI tender offer.
