New Levels.fyi analyses show how equity grants at frontier tech companies have turned into life-changing sums.
A SpaceX Software Engineer II offer from August 2022 included a $155,000 salary and a $365,000 equity grant that vested over five years. At SpaceX's IPO valuation, that grant is estimated to be worth more than $4 million, assuming it was held.
At Anthropic, engineers who joined in 2023 may now be sitting on equity worth tens of millions of dollars after the AI company's valuation surge.
OpenAI shows a similar pattern, with some 2022 and 2023 equity grants to engineers now valued at over $50 million.
These are not guaranteed windfalls: variables such as vesting, dilution, and lockups mean employees may end up with less. And don't forget those huge tax bills.
Still, these estimates give a real taste of the wealth that Silicon Valley has created — and spread among workers.
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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on [email protected].ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads
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