According to informed sources, OpenAI has completed a transaction to sell approximately $7 billion in shares to employees, with the company’s valuation remaining at $852 billion, consistent with the valuation following the completion of the $122 billion financing round in March 2026. This transaction repurchased shares from current and former employees through a tender offer, rather than bringing in external investors such as Thrive Capital and SoftBank Group (SFTBY) as in previous instances. The transaction had been in preparation since the conclusion of the financing round, with the aim of alleviating the company’s short-term liquidity pressures and allowing employees to partially cash out before the company’s potential initial public offering (IPO).
Secondary market stock sales have become an important component of OpenAI’s pre-IPO strategy. In 2024, the company completed a $1.5 billion tender offer; in October 2025, it completed another $6.6 billion transaction, at which time the company was valued at $500 billion.
Such company-led employee share sales are becoming increasingly common in Silicon Valley, with long-term pre-IPO companies including Stripe, Databricks, and SpaceX (SPCX) all having adopted similar approaches to provide liquidity to employees. According to media reports citing Carta data, current and former employees of private companies sold approximately $1.7 billion in shares in 2025, exceeding the total for 2024 and 2023 combined. Javier Avalos, CEO of private market data platform Caplight, pointed out that OpenAI employees have held fully vested shares for some time, and the company faces pressure to provide liquidity to its employees. In addition to company-led tender offers, some employees have also sold shares through independent secondary transactions.
However, employee share sales can only alleviate internal liquidity pressures and cannot meet the substantial capital demands of frontier model companies. According to media reports, both OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic anticipate spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computing services in the future, and an IPO serves as an important channel for raising such capital.
According to reports, OpenAI has significantly stepped back from its initial plan of “going public as early as this fall,” and is now leaning toward postponing its IPO timeline to 2027. This shift stems from the conflict between CEO Sam Altman’s insistence on a trillion-dollar valuation floor and market realities. The sharp volatility in SpaceX’s stock price after its listing serves as a psychological deterrent to OpenAI, with investment banking advisors explicitly warning that recent volatility in technology stocks and the pullback in SpaceX’s share price could weaken retail investor enthusiasm for OpenAI’s issued shares.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s financial condition continues to test investor patience. The company posted a net loss of as much as $38.5 billion last year, primarily driven by expenditures on computing infrastructure, research and development, and structural adjustments. In the first quarter of 2026, the company burned through $3.7 billion in cash, exceeding half of the $5.7 billion in revenue for the same period. The company expects to invest $600 billion in computing and hardware by 2030. In recent months, some major investors have privately expressed concerns over the rapid pace of cash burn, while other investors have hedged their risks by injecting capital into Anthropic.
