IBL News | New York
OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in recent history to keep its lead in the AI race.
The company is trying this by paying out massive stock compensation packages, according to The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI’s stock-based compensation is expected to increase by about $3 billion annually through 2030.
As a result, some top researchers and engineers are becoming some of the richest employees in Silicon Valley.
OpenAI is facing pressure to increase employee pay, especially after Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg swept up 20-plus OpenAI personnel, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, and began offering pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The company’s compensation [its CEO in the picture above] as a percentage of revenue was set to reach 46% in 2025, the highest among the 18 companies, except for Rivian.
Palantir’s stock-based compensation equaled 33% of its revenue the year before its IPO in 2020, Google’s was 15%, and Facebook’s was 6%, the analysis shows. On average, each company’s stock-based compensation made up about 6% of revenue among tech companies.