News item: Last fall, more than 600 OpenAI employees went from being paper millionaires to the real thing by selling $6.6 billion worth of the company’s stock.
Also a news item: The San Francisco real estate market — especially for high-end stuff millionaires want to live in — is booming.
Before you correlation/causation folks jump in: No, we don’t know that every OpenAI employee who turned their shares into cash immediately sank that money into San Francisco housing. But something is goosing the local real estate market, and everyone in town believes it’s AI money.
This market is nuts. 3 bedroom in SF we were going to see this week has over 10 offers, 9 days after being listed.
— Katie Jacobs Stanton (@KatieS) April 22, 2026
And all of this is happening before OpenAI and Anthropic go public, which will unleash even more money into a market that’s already incredibly frothy.
That’s because the traditional Silicon Valley wealth cycle has changed. In the old days, you signed on to work at a risky, high-flying startup — and if everything worked out, your shares in that startup would turn into real money years later, when it turned into a public company.
Now you don’t need to wait for the IPO: It’s routine for big, valuable private companies to stay private, while giving employees and investors a way to cash out before going public, via secondary stock sales.
That’s not an AI innovation. We’ve seen it for years through companies like Stripe, which routinely manages share sales for current and former employees, minting millionaires without ever going public. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is about to go public, has been doing the same for its employees for years.
But even by those standards, what happened at OpenAI last fall is something extraordinary. The Wall Street Journal reports that Sam Altman’s company, which had previously limited share sales to $10 million per employee, boosted the limit to $30 million, and that about 75 employees sold the full amount.
And all of that new money has shown up to a town that’s already seen crazy comp deals for in-demand AI employees, who can negotiate NBA-level employment packages — or convince Big Tech companies to buy their startups for huge sums.
So it’s not hard to understand why Bay Area housing prices have jumped 14% in the last year, per RedFin, driven in large part by sales of luxury properties, which now average around $7 million, up from $5 million in 2020.
And it’s easy to understand why conversations about real estate in the area — a long-standing obsession in an area with limited housing stock and ever-increasing wealth — are more fraught than ever.
Which raises an obvious question: If this is what the pre-IPO AI boom looks like, what happens when the IPOs actually arrive?
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