SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the Next Gold Rush of Tech Wealth
The Million Dollar Question: In its 2025 employee share sale, OpenAI let some staff cash out — while the company was still private — up to how much each?
A) $1 million B) $5 million C) $30 million D) $100 millionRead on for the answer.
A short list of private companies is about to convert a decade of paper equity into real money, and the numbers involved are large enough to move the millionaire count of entire cities. Here is what is actually happening, who gets paid, and how many new fortunes it realistically creates.
What’s happening
For most of the 2010s, the biggest technology companies stayed private far longer than their predecessors did. Equity piled up inside SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, and Revolut as their valuations climbed into the tens and hundreds of billions — but it was equity on paper, hard to spend and harder to sell. That backlog is now unwinding in two ways at once.
The first is a return of the big initial public offering. After a quiet stretch, 2025 brought a run of large tech listings — CoreWeave, Circle, Figma, Chime, and Klarna among them — and the marquee names are lining up behind them. SpaceX has told staff it is preparing for a possible 2026 public offering, and OpenAI, Anthropic, and Revolut are all widely expected to follow.
The second, quieter mechanism is the secondary sale — a company-organized event that lets employees and early investors sell some shares to new buyers without the company going public at all. These have become the pressure valve of the private market: SpaceX runs tender offers roughly twice a year, and OpenAI, Stripe, and Revolut have each run one in the past year. The result is that wealth is reaching people well before any IPO bell rings.
Who’s getting rich
It helps to separate the groups, because “tech millionaires” is not one population.
At the top are the founders and earliest investors, whose stakes are measured in billions, not millions. This is a small group — a few dozen people across these companies — and an IPO mostly changes the liquidity of their wealth, not its existence.
The larger and more interesting group is employees with equity. Headcounts here are not small: SpaceX employs roughly 18,000 people, OpenAI is around 4,500 and hiring toward 8,000, and Anthropic runs lean at a few thousand. Not everyone at these firms holds meaningful equity, and the value of a grant depends heavily on when you joined. But an engineer who joined SpaceX or OpenAI years ago, at a fraction of today’s valuation, can be sitting on a stake worth $1M–$10M — and in senior or very early cases, considerably more.
Below that are the adjacent winners: early-stage investors and venture funds, and the wealth managers, tax advisors, and private bankers who service a sudden crop of newly liquid clients. Sudden wealth is itself an industry.
Why now
Three forces are arriving together. Valuations have reached levels that make even modest equity stakes life-changing: SpaceX completed a tender offer at an $800 billion valuation, OpenAI ran an employee sale at about $500 billion and has been valued higher since, and Anthropic closed a round in May 2026 that valued it near $965 billion — up from $380 billion just three months earlier.
At the same time, employees who have waited years for liquidity are pushing for it, and companies have responded by normalizing the pre-IPO cash-out. And the AI boom in particular has pulled a flood of new capital toward a handful of firms, concentrating an unusual amount of value in very few companies. When those companies finally provide liquidity, the payout is concentrated too.
How the money actually reaches people
The path from “valuable equity” to “money in the bank” runs through a few specific events, and the distinction matters.
In an IPO, the company sells shares to the public. Employees usually cannot sell immediately — a lock-up period of around 90 to 180 days typically applies — but once it lifts, vested shares can be sold on the open market. This is the classic wealth event, and the one with the most visible first-day fireworks: the ten biggest 2025 IPOs popped about 37% on average on day one, with CoreWeave later up roughly 150% from its offer price.
In a secondary or tender offer, the company arranges a sale of existing shares at a set price — SpaceX’s recent tender priced shares at $421 each — and employees choose how much to sell. OpenAI’s 2025 sale moved about $6.6 billion in shares, with more than 600 current and former staff participating. Stripe ran a tender at a $159 billion valuation, and Revolut’s $75 billion secondary let employees and early backers sell ahead of an eventual IPO it hopes will reach $150B–$200B.
Crucially, much of this wealth is vested but restricted until one of these events. OpenAI has reportedly set aside an employee stock pool worth roughly $50 billion — real value to the people who hold it, but only spendable once it can be sold.
How many millionaires — the numbers
Here the honest answer is a range, not a headline figure, because companies do not publish how many of their employees cross $1M.
But the order of magnitude is not in doubt. Take the three biggest pending names together. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic carry a combined private valuation of well over $2.5 trillion across roughly 25,000 employees. Even if only a third to a half of those staff hold equity that clears seven figures at current valuations — a conservative read given how early many of them joined — that points to somewhere in the range of 8,000 to 15,000 new paper millionaires from these three firms alone. Layer in Stripe, Databricks, Revolut, and the 2025 IPO cohort, and the figure for this single wave runs comfortably into the tens of thousands.
That tracks with the macro picture. UBS projects about 5.34 million new U.S.-dollar millionaires worldwide by 2029, concentrated in the United States and China, and notes that much of the increase comes from entrepreneurship and stock-market listings. This tech-liquidity wave is one of the most concentrated single contributors to that trend — a handful of companies producing a city’s worth of millionaires.
A note on what “millionaire” means here: most of these are paper millionaires at the $1M–$5M band, whose wealth is concentrated in a single illiquid asset and exposed to tax and market swings. A smaller tier reaches $5M–$30M, and a still-smaller group of long-tenured staff and executives crosses $30M+. Founders sit in the $1B+ band entirely apart. The wave is real, but it is not evenly distributed.
The catch
A liquidity event is not the same as keeping the money. Several frictions sit between a valuation and a bank balance.
Taxes take a large bite. Exercising options and selling shares triggers income or capital-gains tax, and in high-tax states the combined rate can approach or exceed half the gain. Some employees also face the alternative minimum tax simply for exercising options before they sell — a tax bill on gains they have not yet cashed.
Paper value can evaporate. Klarna’s stock fell roughly 30%–37% below its IPO price within months of listing. An employee who counted the IPO-day number as their net worth, and did not sell, watched a third of it disappear.
Concentration is the quiet risk. A newly minted millionaire whose entire fortune is one company’s stock is far more exposed than the figure suggests. The standard advice — diversify out of the single position once you can — is exactly what the lock-up and tax rules make hard to do at the right moment.
What people get wrong
The biggest misconception is that an IPO creates wealth. It mostly converts it — turning illiquid equity that already existed into something sellable. The value was largely there before the bell; the event changes who can spend it and when.
The second is imagining the payout is evenly shared. Coverage tends to feature the founder’s billions or the viral story of an early employee, which makes it sound as if everyone at these firms is now rich. In reality the distribution is steeply skewed: a few enormous fortunes at the top, a broad band of $1M–$10M employee stakes, and a long tail of staff whose grants are real but modest.
The third is treating the first-day “pop” as the number that matters. The headline pop is a single day’s trading; what an employee actually nets depends on the lock-up, the price months later, and the tax owed — often a very different figure from the one in the launch-day story.
And the fourth is assuming this wave is permanent. Liquidity windows open and close with the market. The 2025–2026 stretch is unusually rich because so many delayed giants are unwinding at once. The next cohort of companies may wait just as long, and exit into a far less generous market.
Bottom line
The Final Answer: C — up to $30 million each. In its 2025 secondary sale, OpenAI allowed eligible employees to sell as much as $30 million in shares apiece, part of roughly $6.6 billion sold by more than 600 current and former staff — and that was while the company was still private. It is a clean illustration of the larger story: the biggest wealth events in tech are no longer waiting for the IPO.
Taken together, the current wave of listings and secondary sales is plausibly minting new millionaires in the tens of thousands, with a much smaller number crossing into $10M+ and $100M+ territory. But the durable lesson is the one the paper-millionaire bands make plain. A valuation is a starting point, not a finish line — and what separates a lasting fortune from a fleeting one is what happens after the money finally becomes real: the tax planning, the decision to diversify, and the discipline not to mistake one good day’s price for wealth.
Related reading: Tech Wealth: How Founders and Investors Live Differently · Paths to Millions: How First-Generation Wealth Is Actually Built · Wealth Levels: Life at $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B · Borrowing Against Wealth: Why the Rich Often Use Debt
