OpenAI is distributing $6 billion to staff, potentially $10 million per engineer. Meta counters with cash packages up to $100 million, testing whether mission-driven work beats pure money. What people say they'd do for that much money rarely matches what they actually do.
Chapters
there's a $6 billion secondary for staff at OpenAI. Um, and a lot of them are gonna make great money at scale. What do we think of staff secondaries at this level of scale, which is in the multiple hundreds, if not low thousands now, or low thousand, um, getting this level of secondary? First start there.
Good for them. And it's, you know, uh, they, I mean, and it probably speaks, look, again, it speaks to willing buyer, willing seller, a couple things, and informed buyer. And it also speaks to, look, we've talked about this, given the competitive pressure that Meta has exerted on AI salaries by being willing to offer people cash positions, allegedly, and I haven't, $10 to $100 million. If you're sitting there in OpenAI, Yeah, you can talk about the mission till you're blue in the face, but it's gonna help a lot if you can also take off $10 million. So you're going home. I mean, you know, 'cause it's over. One thing I've learned about large amounts of money, as I see this in acquisitions, is one of my rules is this, what people say they'll do when faced with a large amount of money is meaningless and bears no relevance either way to what they'll actually do. Predicting who wants to sell their company based on what they say in the abstract is a waste of time. When you get, so taking these offers, when you get you get the $10 million or $100 million offer from Meta, it rocks you back, I'd say. And you go home, you talk to your spouse, do we want to do this? This changes the rest of our life. And that's real competition. So if you're OpenAI, you can preach the mission, but at some point you got to match the dollars. And that's, I mean, if you think about it, $6 billion, it's only 60 $100 million engineers. It's only 600 $10 million engineers. I mean, stunningly, you know, to Zacharias' comment, it ain't that much, which is hilarious, but wow.
