Million-dollar pay: Sam Altman offering highest-ever salaries; $1.5m average stock pay
OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, is reportedly outpaying Meta's Mark Zuckerberg in employee compensation. The AI firm is offering an average of $1.5 million in stock-based pay, significantly exceeding historical tech startup figures. This aggressive strategy aims to retain top AI talent amidst fierce competition, even as Meta has also made substantial offers to lure researchers.
Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, appears to be beating Facebok founder Mark Zuckerberg in the one area where Meta has focused its most aggressive resources: salaries to its employees – making company researchers and engineers some of the richest employees in Silicon Valley.
Citing financial data that the company has shown to its investors, a report by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is paying its employees an average of $1.5 million each in stock-based compensation – which is more than any tech startup in the recent history. OpenAI is said to have a workforce of roughly 4,000.The report said that this compensation is more than seven times higher than the stock-based pay Google disclosed in 2003, a year before the company filed for an initial public offering.
Moreover, the $1.5 million is about 34 times the average employee compensation of 18 other large tech companies in the year before they went public, as per to a Wall Street Journal analysis of major tech IPOs over the last 25 years. Notably, the compensation figures have been adjusted into 2025 dollars to account for inflation.
OpenAI's Master Plan for India
In fact,
’s figure was roughly 6% before it went public in 2012, according to data compiled by the Journal.
Mark Zuckerberg ‘poached’ employees for multi-million-dollar packages
In 2025, as the need for AI talent soared, Zuckerberg reportedly paid nine-figure, and sometimes billion-dollar (Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati's Al startup Thinking Machines Lab), packages to lure top-tier researchers. Meta even hired around 20 employees from OpenAI, which has reportedly issued one-time bonuses worth millions.It is to be noted that OpenAI recently told employees it would scrap a policy requiring them to stay at the company for at least six months before equity begins vesting, which means the employees can get access to their awards quickly.