Throughout 2025, the top Silicon Valley firms have been engaged in a feeding frenzy of epic proportions, shelling out hundreds of millions — sometimes even topping a billion — dollars to poach top AI experts from their rival corporations.
The result is that tech workers at companies building AI — the technology which, their bosses insist, will one day automate all jobs — are making an astonishing amount of money. That’s according to fresh reporting by the Wall Street journal, which found that, on average, OpenAI employees are the highest paid startup workers in recent history.
In 2025, financial records show that OpenAI’s workforce of 4,000 receive stock-based compensation averaging $1.5 million per worker. These are the technical and operational jobs, presumably, like account managers, engineers, and researchers. (As OpenAI contracts more menial roles like janitors or security officers to third-party “suppliers,” it’s likely those workers don’t receive the same compensation, or were even included in the WSJ‘s analysis.)
Given that OpenAI is gearing up for an IPO in 2026, the WSJ compared its 2025 payroll to 18 other firms in the year before they went public — and found that the compensation isn’t even remotely close.
Google parent company Alphabet, for example, was the second runner-up to OpenAI. Compared to Alphabet’s employee compensation in 2003, OpenAI is paying its employees seven times more on average, counting inflation. Overall, the newspaper found that OpenAI is paying its high-level staffers 34 times more than the average across similar tech firms in the year before an IPO.
The news comes as other tech giants are struggling with their own efforts to maintain cutting-edge AI teams. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for one example, has reportedly torpedoed his relationship with his recently-appointed chief AI officer, the wunderkind Alex Wang.
Back in June, Zuckerberg shelled out $14 billion to snag Wang’s startup, Scale AI, and recruit the 28-year-old AI whisperer in the process. Months after the news that Wang was to begin heading up Meta’s AI team, the company’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, decided to split from the corporation to found his own startup amid tension between the two.
Given that Wang and LeCun can likely measure their compensation from Meta in the hundreds of millions or more, it’s unlikely that more money would have prevented their relationships with the tech giant from deteriorating. Still, their stories offer a fascinating glimpse at the lengths these unfathomably wealthy corporations are willing to go to eke out a lead in the AI footrace — as well as the difficulty retaining that talent when all the competitors are cutting huge checks as well.
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