Is OpenAI worth anywhere near $150 billion without the employees who actually built it?

In 2023, four of OpenAI’s key players were Sam Altman (CEO), Mira Murati (CTO), Greg Brockman (President), and Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist and former board member).

One year later, Altman is the last one standing.

Mira Murati resigned this week, stepping away to “create the time and space to do [her] own exploration.” This came four months after Sutskever resigned, and seven weeks after Brockman announced an “extended leave of absence.” And these are far from the only significant departures at OpenAI over the last year.

Jan Leike, who was, at the time, OpenAI’s Head of Alignment tasked with aligning artificial super intelligences to ensure safety, stepped away alongside Ilya, later joining competitor Anthropic. The day of Brockman’s announcement, The Information reported that co-founder John Schulman also left for Anthropic, and VP of Consumer Product Peter Deng, the former Chief Product Officer at Airtable, stepped away too. Besides Murati, OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research Barret Zoph also announced on X earlier this week they were leaving the company. In February, co-founder Andrej Karpathy resigned as well, and two months ago he launched AI-native education company Eureka Labs. 

That is at least nine high-profile exits from OpenAI in the last eight months alone, all while the company is in discussions to raise new funding at an eye-watering $150 billion valuation. What’s up with everyone leaving? I have some thoughts.

First, OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit, but its structure was changed to a complicated “capped profit” model to help the company 1) raise venture capital and 2) attract and retain talent. The growing emphasis on profit was a shift from the company’s motto: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” and after his resignation, Leike noted that the company’s shifting priorities ultimately led to him stepping away:

I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research. However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company's core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point…

Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor. OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity. But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.

Now, the company is leaning even further into the for-profit direction, with Reuters reporting that OpenAI’s potential $150 billion fundraise is contingent on the company again adjusting its corporate structure and removing its investor profit cap. Right now, OpenAI’s for-profit equity structure “caps that limit the maximum financial returns to investors and employees to incentivize them to research, develop, and deploy AGI in a way that balances commerciality with safety and sustainability, rather than focusing on pure profit-maximization.”

Venture capitalists, at the end of the day, are interested in financial returns, so it’s no surprise that they want to terminate the profit cap. But as the company strays further from its nonprofit roots, key employees may have felt similar to Leike: if “shiny products” have become the priority, they are no longer aligned with the company’s mission and want out.

However, another factor at play is that these employees have had the opportunity to sell some of their equity for massive returns. All of the above-mentioned employees have been at OpenAI since at least 2022, when OpenAI was valued at ~$20 billion, and most of them started even earlier, when OpenAI’s valuation was much lower. In February 2024, they were able to sell some of their stakes in a tender offer at an $86 billion valuation. If you were a long-tenured employee at OpenAI, and you took some chips off the table in that tender offer, you’re rich. And not only are you rich, you are a hot commodity in a hot labor market in the hottest sector in technology right now. You would have no problem raising capital for a new startup or getting paid top-dollar to join another AI startup or a big tech company.

The real question is, if you’re already rich, anyone would hire or fund you, and the company you’ve worked at for years has changed its entire mission statement… why would you stay? What’s the upside, especially when your peers are rushing for the exit? The rational decision is to take your millions and figure out what you want to do next, unless you’re Sam Altman.

Altman famously had no equity in OpenAI, noting at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit in June 2023 that he has “enough money,” and “This concept of having enough money is not something that is easy to get across to other people.” However, Altman, who is, according to Forbes, worth $1 billion, could receive a 7% equity stake in OpenAI if it is restructured as a for-profit business, which would increase his net worth by $10.5 billion. Not bad for someone who “has enough money,” right?

The question now is whether investors will get cold feet as key figures in the company continue to resign. Is a $150 billion company still a $150 billion company if the folks who built it are no longer there? I guess we’ll find out soon.