FACTS ONPROP 40.

Facts on Prop 40 / The research

Issue Brief: Anthropic and OpenAI Initial Public Offerings are projected to generate enormous wealth for tech sector billionaires in California

Anthropic/OpenAI IPO

October 20264 pages

Introduction

This memo examines the unique impact of the impending IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI on the wealth of tech sector millionaires and billionaires employed by the companies. An analysis from Sacra, a market research firm, estimated that the combined IPOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX could create 20 new billionaires and around 16,000 new millionaires from among the employee base.1 Of course, this understates the economic impact on the billionaire tax because many of the companies’ founders, directors, individual investors and maybe some of the early employees are already billionaires thanks to previous funding rounds that have driven valuations of these companies into the stratosphere.

Given the fairly opaque nature of the companies at this stage of the IPO process (both have filed confidential S-1 statements with the SEC) it is difficult to pin down exactly who might be most favorably impacted by the IPOs, let alone begin to guess the impact of the wealth gains om billionaire tax revenue projections. With regards to the SpaceX IPO alone, it was projected that it would lead 4,400 current and former employees to become millionaires, with about 400 seeing their wealth exceeding $100 million.2 Additionally, key executives such as Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnson, as well as longtime directors Antonio Gracias and Luke Nosek were expected to see their wealth breach the $1 billion threshold. Many of the key executives and company founders are already pretty well known-they tend to have worked for other Bay Area Tech titans (e.g. Meta, Google, Airbnb, Saleforce, Stripe) and often have large following on social media. To identify other potential billionaire beneficiaries—hypothesized as being early employees, especially on the research and engineering front3—this memo examined the linkedin profiles for founders, particularly focusing on the related profiles, which were often composed of high-level executives as well as key employees on the technical and business side.

Anthropic

IPO Details

Anthropic filed their S-1 statement on June 1 with the expectation of initiating as early as October 2026; however they are currently targeting a November date amid widespread calls for a slowdown in the development of the technology.4 The company has a current valuation of $965 billion and has attracted 94 investors across 18 funding rounds. The large institutional investors include Amazon, Alphabet, Salesforce, Zoom and SK Telecom. The company employs about 2,500 workers; the company’s cofounders and current and former employees hold the majority of equity in the company.5 Anthropic recently told investors than it had reached an annualized revenue “run rate” of $65 billion6, and the company is reportedly aiming for a post IPO valuation of around $2 trillion.7 The following identifies founders (who are already billionaires) as well as other key actors who by virtue of their relationship to the company may achieve billionaire status post IPO.

Founders

Anthropic formed as a breakaway from Open AI in 2021. The company founders include:

  • Dario Amodei (CEO)

  • Daniela Amodei (President, Dario’s sister)

  • Tom Brown (Lead author on a Chat GPT3 paper)

  • Jack Clark (AI Policy lead)

  • Jared Kaplan (Theoretical Physicist and Chief Science Officer)

  • Sam McCandlish (Research lead)

  • Christopher Olah (Interpretability Research Pioneer)

The founders all became billionaires after a $3.5 billion funding round in March 2025. The Forbes real time net worth tracker estimates the current value of their fortunes as $15.5 billion apiece.8

Key Board Member(s)

  • Yasmin Razavi—general partner at Spark Capital since 2017, an early investor in Anthropic, has held an “investor” seat on the board since January 2023

Key employees

This analysis concerns only employees based in California; others that work in Seattle, New York and DC would be excluded from the billionaire tax.

  • Krishna Rao—Chief Financial Officer, at Anthropic since May 2024. Formerly had a prominent role with Airbnb from 2015 to 2021.

  • Andrew Zloto—Head of Capital Markets and Corporate Development since May 2025, previously worked for SoftBank and Airbnb.

  • Brian Israel—Chief Legal Officer since July 2025, previously General Counsel since October 2022

  • Elena Leichty—Just started as General Counsel, previously Associate General Counsel since July 2023

  • Sasha de Marigny—Chief Brands & Communications Officer since August 2023, previously at Stripe for 7 years,

  • Boris Cherny—Creator and Head of Claude Code, previously spent 7 years at Meta

  • Sid Bidasaria—Founding Engineer of Claude Code, Tech Lead, since August 2024

  • Adam Wolff—Member of Technical Staff since June 2024, previously an engineering director at Facebook for 8 years, then an organizational leader for the engineering team at Robinhood.

  • Amanda Askell—Member of the Technical Staff since March 2021, previously a research scientist at OpenAI

  • Eric Boyd—Head of Infrastructure since April 2026, previously at Microsoft for about 16 years, including 11 years as president of their AI platform for 11 years.9

  • Mike Kreiger—Chief Products Officer since May 2024, a co-founder of Instagram and listed on Time Magazine’s 100 most influential AI actors of 2025.10

  • Peter Bailis-Member of the technical Staff since March 2026, previously VP of Engineering at Google.

OpenAI

OpenAI filed their S-1 with the SEC a week after Anthropic. They are currently valued at $852 billion and are aiming for a post IPO valuation of around $1 trillion. Current and former employees hold about $125 billion of this value and 10 shareholders hold an additional $10 billion. The largest institutional investors include Amazon11, SoftBank, Nvidia, Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz and D.E. Shaw Ventures. During a March 2026 funding round Open AI raised $122 billion “in committed capital”, including $3 billion from retail investors.12

As of mid-September, CEO Sam Altman has indicated that the company is likely to delay its IPO until at least 2027 while it tries to get a handle on safety concerns.13 This means that OpenAI will likely need to continue raising capital from private entities.14

Thanks to recent turmoil amongst the top leadership of OpenAI, it is uncertain who among early participants is invested in the success of the company. The following represents some of the founders, investors and employees who stand to gain the most financially from the IPO when it occurs.

Founders

The most prominent figure associated with OpenAI, current CEO Sam Altman, does not have an equity stake in the company. However, a few of the other California-based founders still work there and would probably stand to benefit substantially from the IPO:

  • Greg Brockman—President and Chairman, former Chief Technical Officer, was briefly ousted by the board/other founders in 2023 along with Sam Altman but almost immediately reinstated after lots of bad press. In his testimony during the trial over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company, Brockman estimated that his current stake in the company was worth nearly $30 billion, from an initial valuation of $10 million in 2017.15

  • Wojciech Zaremba—Based in San Francisco and with OpenAI since 2016. Previously worked as a research scientist at Facebook and Google Brain.

Most of the other founders do not appear to be currently affiliated with the company, but some may still have stakes in the company. Ex founders who are still based in California include:

  • Vicki Cheung—Founding engineer and head of infrastructure from 2015 to 2017

  • Pamela Vagata—previously worked in software development at Microsoft, Facebook and Stripe.16

  • Ilya Sutskever—Chief Scientist from 2016 to 2024. After leaving OpenAI helped to found Safe Superintelligence Inc.17

Key early investors

  • Reid Hoffman—founder of Linkedin, on the Open AI board from 2018 until 2023

  • Jessica Livingston—co-founder of Y Combinator

Key Employees

  • Chris Lehane—Chief Global Affairs Officer since April 2024, previously a Senior VP of Policy & Communications at Airbnb from 2015 to 2022. Also on the Time Magazine 100 most influential list for 2025.18

  • Fidji Simo—OpenAO advisor, CEO of Instacart from 2021 to 2025

  • Jakub Pachocki—Chief Scientist, started as the Research Lead at OpenAI in 2017

  • Brad Lightcap—Chief Operating Officer, at OpenAI since 2018, previously at Y Combinator

  • Szymon Sidor—Technical Fellow, at Open AI since 2016

  • Lukasz Kaiser—Member of Technical Staff since 2021, previously staff research scientist at Google from 2013 to 2021.

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/business/economy/spacex-openai-anthropic-billionaires-ipos.html↩︎

  2. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/technology/spacex-ipo-employee-millionaires.html↩︎

  3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidhauser_an-anthropic-ipo-could-turn-hundreds-of-early-share-7469829362209583105-WSBo/↩︎

  4. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-shifts-planned-ipo-to-november-8874dffc?_gl=1*1sm0c8h*_gcl_au*MjEzNTQxMTIzMC4xNzkxMzExNTIw*_ga*Nzk3MzE0OTM3LjE3OTEzMTE1MjA.*_ga_K2H7B9JRSS*czE3OTEzMTE1MTkkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTEzMTE1MTkkajYwJGwwJGgxMDk4Mjg0MTA2↩︎

  5. https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-anthropic/↩︎

  6. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/anthropic-says-annualized-revenue-climbed-to-65-billion-in-july.html↩︎

  7. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-expected-to-tell-investors-it-sees-over-30-trillion-in-potential-revenue-a611efea↩︎

  8. https://www.forbes.com/profile/dario-amodei/↩︎

  9. May be based in the Seattle area↩︎

  10. https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305832/mike-krieger/↩︎

  11. Also Anthropic’s largest investor↩︎

  12. https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-openai/↩︎

  13. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/12/openai-delays-ipo-sam-altman-ai-safety-concerns↩︎

  14. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/09/30/openais-delayed-ipo-means-more-reliance-on-private-investment↩︎

  15. https://www.businessinsider.com/greg-brockman-openai-president-elon-musk-trial-testimony-2026-5↩︎

  16. She does not include any references to her work with OpenAI on her linkedin page.↩︎

  17. A key figure in the action to kick Sam Altman and Greg Brockman out of the company.↩︎

  18. https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305826/chris-lehane/↩︎