The tender lets current and former employees cash out roughly $6.6 billion without issuing new shares, a classic liquidity valve for a fast-growing private giant. The mechanism avoids dilution while rewarding early risk-takers who weathered years of experimental research cycles.

The outcome crowns OpenAI as the world’s most valuable startup, edging past SpaceX’s recent ~$400 billion mark and signaling where big money thinks the next decade is headed. It is a baton pass from rockets to reasoning engines—at least for this market cycle.

Buyers reportedly included Softbank’s Vision Fund, Thrive Capital, T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, a who’s who of late-stage capital with an appetite for AI scale. Their participation adds prestige, but also expectations that growth targets will stay ambitious.

Crucially, this is a secondary—no fresh cash to the balance sheet—so the win is retention: employees get liquidity while the company avoids the distractions of going public. That tradeoff matters as competitors court talent with equity packages and signing bonuses.

Microsoft remains the indispensable partner, with multiyear infrastructure commitments through Azure and product integrations like Copilot, even as regulators keep an eye on concentration risks. The alliance supplies compute muscle and a distribution funnel few rivals can match.

The new mark follows Softbank’s primary round earlier this year that valued OpenAI at $300 billion; jumping to $500 billion in months shows how heated artificial intelligence (AI) dealmaking has become. Tender markets are a scoreboard when companies delay an IPO.

Under the hood, the finances are still in build mode: about $4.3 billion in first-half 2025 revenue alongside an operating loss of nearly $7.8 billion, driven by training costs and compute-hungry products like ChatGPT. Those outlays buy faster models, richer features, and developer stickiness.

Revenue flows from ChatGPT subscriptions, enterprise licenses and API usage, while the cash burn reflects an ambition to dominate multimodal models and the infrastructure race before rivals close the gap. Hardware partnerships and data center expansion remain front-and-center line items.

The tender also projects confidence: OpenAI cleared more than $10 billion for sale but employees opted to part with only about $6.6 billion, signaling many still want upside exposure. In Silicon Valley, holding is a vote that product pipelines will justify loftier marks.

Context matters: Meta is building custom silicon, Google is iterating on Gemini, and SpaceX remains a juggernaut—yet investors are betting that generative AI will mint the next era’s platform winner. The question is execution: shipping reliable tools while navigating energy, ethics and policy.

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