OpenAI Valued at $500B, Surpasses SpaceX

OpenAI completed a secondary share sale that allowed current and former employees to sell roughly $6.6 billion of stock, valuing the company at about $500 billion and making it the world’s most valuable private company, surpassing SpaceX. Investors in the transaction included Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T. Rowe Price, and the deal provided employee liquidity rather than new funding. The price tag far exceeded earlier valuations around $300 billion and underscores a broader AI investment surge. OpenAI has signed major cloud and infrastructure deals and is planning massive data-center and compute investments with partners including Oracle, SK hynix and Samsung while pursuing broader hardware partnerships. The company is also negotiating corporate-structure changes with Microsoft as it commercializes frontier models, and some industry figures and sovereign investors have publicly warned the market may be “frothy.”