Mostly in America: you start work, they give you shares of the company. They tell you that if you work hard and this thing works, everyone can have a great Christmas, Diwala, Salah, etc depending on your call. And just like that, the game begins. Those shares at $10 could jump to $40, and they buy them back from you – and as that happens, there will be money everywhere. People, it is always a big rain, and when it happens at scale, financial liberation comes.
OpenAI employees are experiencing a major rain as Softbank comes with a truckload of cash to buy them out: “In a significant development for employees and investors, OpenAI is offering a new tender opportunity for current and former employees to sell approximately $1.5 billion worth of shares to SoftBank”.
Most of those shares will be employee stock options which Softbank can convert, via OpenAI, to common full shares even as some with common shares (a super minority in this case) exit. In other words, SoftBank is creating liquidity to enable OpenAI to exit some shareholders and also put cash in the pockets of workers.
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This tender offer comes after SoftBank’s $500 million investment in OpenAI during its last funding round. It highlights the persistence of Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s billionaire founder, in securing a larger slice of the AI market. Known for his investments in transformative technology, Son has signaled his commitment to artificial intelligence, recently stating he is reserving “tens of billions of dollars” for AI ventures.
SoftBank’s interest in OpenAI complements its broader AI strategy, following investments in startups such as Glean, Perplexity, and Poolside through its Vision Fund 2. With assets exceeding $160 billion, SoftBank has made AI a cornerstone of its investment philosophy.
Say it another way: many $millionaires will be minted when this deal closes. And many of them will retire or leave the company for their passions. And that is the risk for OpenAI there: if people become rich that money is no more a motivator, many bad things happen as those cubicles could become empty. But for all humans, it is a good problem for society because abundance will be scaled.
OpenAI will allow its staff to sell $1.5 billion in stock in a new tender offer to Japan’s SoftBank, CNBC reports, citing anonymous sources. The financing would allow the tech conglomerate to get a bigger share of the ChatGPT maker. It will also let current and former OpenAI employees cash out on their restricted stock units. The unit price will be $210, after OpenAI was valued at around $157 billion in October. Meanwhile, the company just suspended access to its unreleased video generation tool Sora following a protest of its treatment of creatives. (Linked News)
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