OpenAI buys back $7B in employee shares at $852B valuation

OpenAI bought back $7 billion of shares from current and former employees at a valuation of $852 billion. The buyback gives its workers a cash exit while the company mulls a public listing it confidentially filed for in June.

Why OpenAI’s buyback lands before the IPO

The stock purchase, disclosed on August 10, gives OpenAI employees a way to cash out paper equity without waiting for a stock market launch. Much of the staff pay is in shares they cannot easily sell. A company tender is one of the few ways to get liquidity before a listing ties them down with IPO constraints.

The size of the tender offer suggests that a public offering is not imminent. In June, OpenAI filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to keep the option open for later this year.

Companies are staying private much longer than the last generation of startups, choosing to implement secondary sales.

The $852 billion values the company at the same level as OpenAI’s March funding round, led by SoftBank with a $122 billion investment. Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft all participated.

At the time, Cryptopolitan reported that the round made OpenAI the most valuable private company in the world.

A May report from Cryptopolitan found that over 600 current and former OpenAI employees had already sold stakes, following a ~$6.6 billion tender in October 2025 backed by Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX, and T. Rowe Price.

OpenAI gives its employees an average of $1.5 million in stock.

OpenAI missed financial targets

OpenAI reportedly failed to hit internal financial targets in April.

“We did not have our best 12 months ever, which is mostly my fault, but we are about to have our best 12 months to date,” Sam Altman told staff last month.

we did not have our best last 12 months ever, which is mostly my fault, but we are about to have our best 12 months to date. the team is doing amazing work and i think you’ll be very happy with what they’ve got cooking for you.

i am happy about this for many reasons, but mostly…

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 16, 2026

Rival Anthropic, which reportedly turned a profit earlier this year, raises the bar for what investors want from companies going public, including clean results.

While OpenAI’s disclosures in March showed it had $2 billion in monthly revenue and more than 900 million weekly active users, it is still not profitable.

The company is also tied to a possible $300 billion Oracle cloud deal, a $22.4 billion CoreWeave contract and the $500 billion Stargate venture with SoftBank and Oracle.

To match that bill with its revenues, the ChatGPT maker trimmed its long-term compute plan to about $600 billion through 2030 and shut down its Sora video product.