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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

The article talks about averages, but what I want know is the median. The usual situation, and I have zero reason to believe OpenAI is different, is that stock options are top heavy leaning heavily toward executives.

I want to know rank and file salaries as opposed to stock options

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Business & back office employee salaries are standard but not impressive. Similarly, stock grants are better than most places but not wildly high unless you're in specific engineering & research functions. This is the same at Anthropic, too (I recently interviewed for director level business roles at both).

In general, I wish the media would stop using just the average when the distribution is not normal.

That's exactly why they use averages, though. Propaganda is insidious in that way.

Who is “they”? I believe open AI would share averages for that reason but not that media would choose to cover it that way.

I think the simpler answer (and thus more likely) is that statistics education in the US is very bad (they should teach stats in high school, not calculus), and reporters just don't understand it. And the ones who do, believe (correctly) that their audience does not understand it.

The whole way media treats numbers is more than tiring:

"X increased by Y"

Sure... but:

- What's the relative increase? - Is this increase out of the ordinary? Annually? Globally?

But I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy. Rather: Most journalists are not very smart.

Illlquid “stock options” in a private company is not what I consider compensation.

This is the general rule, but not for ones the size of OpenAI. There’s always a secondary market for prominent enough companies.

Dont all private companies require approval for secondary sales, which I assume are not ever approved?

Typically. I’d be shocked if OpenAI let employees sell their options like this without requiring approval

They don't but you effectively do it under the table

Do they sell at full value?

How do you define value without an IPO?

Whatever they sell them for is the value.

They do, but you sell forward contracts instead. This is perfectly legal, and the approach I've seen. There are a few companies, and even funds that will engage in this, in an effort to attain future upside.

Its pretty common, Ive personally done this.

I am sure you can make OpenAI stock liquid pretty easily.

Only if you're allowed to which is not always the case.

It’s allowed pretty easily.

They had had tender events (where you can sell your private stock super easily)

They've changed the laws recently which makes it far easier - I believe you'd still need to be accredited but for most of HN, that's a low bar. For OpenAI specifically, they've allowed employees to participate in the funding rounds and they did a separate tender offer with Softbank to provide liquidity to early employees as well;

https://fortune.com/2024/12/17/hundreds-openai-employees-10-...

OpenAI has regular tender offers for their employees, so while this advice is reasonable in general it is less true for this case.

Less true isn’t the same as not true. Simply put we don’t know because it’s not what they are disclosing

This article feels more like paid publicity than it does journalism

The various valuations you see for OpenAI are overwhelmingly based on the prices offered for shares in their employee tender offers so I’d say for OpenAI and SpaceX at a minimum (which has a similar setup for its employees) we have a pretty good idea of what employees are getting for their equity compensation if they so choose.

Dont worry...there is always an acquisition by Meta, on the horizon for any company with nowhere to go.

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