OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable startup after completing a secondary share sale that values the company at $500 billion, eclipsing Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, highlights the frenzied investor appetite for artificial intelligence firms despite the sector’s heavy costs and uncertain path to profitability.
The transaction allowed current and former employees to sell about $6.6 billion worth of stock to investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp., Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price, according to people familiar with the matter. That figure fell short of the $10 billion in shares that OpenAI had initially made eligible for sale—potentially signaling employees’ long-term confidence in the company’s trajectory.
The valuation leap marks a sharp increase from OpenAI’s $300 billion level earlier this year, during a SoftBank-led round, and now places the San Francisco–based firm ahead of SpaceX’s $400 billion valuation. It also distances OpenAI from other global startups such as China’s ByteDance ($220 billion), Anthropic ($183 billion), and India’s Reliance Retail ($100 billion), according to Bloomberg reporting.
OpenAI’s rise underscores its central role in the AI boom, driven by partnerships and infrastructure investments. Despite still being unprofitable, the company has secured major deals with Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., and SK Hynix Inc. to expand its data and computing capacity. Its recently released GPT-5 model, along with new open-source tools, is designed to reinforce its lead in the increasingly crowded AI landscape.
The rapid ascent also comes at a pivotal corporate moment. OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, is in talks with Microsoft to convert into a more conventional for-profit structure—though the nonprofit entity would maintain control through a new public benefit corporation. This shift has drawn scrutiny from Musk, who co-founded OpenAI before departing in 2018 and has since sued the company, alleging it strayed from its original mission.
Competition for AI talent remains fierce. Meta Platforms has been recruiting aggressively from OpenAI and rivals, offering nine-figure pay packages to lure top researchers for its “superintelligence” team. The secondary share sale could help OpenAI retain key staff by giving them liquidity and financial incentives to stay.
Still, the stakes remain high. Bloomberg notes that OpenAI is not only battling Google’s DeepMind and rising rival Anthropic, but also geopolitical competitors such as China’s DeepSeek. With trillions of dollars in infrastructure investment at play, the AI arms race shows no signs of slowing down.
