OpenAI just surpassed SpaceX to become the world’s most valuable private company, and now it’s worth about as much as its mortal enemy and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
Bloomberg reports that OpenAI finalized a deal involving the company’s current and former employees selling about $6.6 billion of stock to several investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and T. Rowe Price.
That deal pushed the AI giant’s valuation to $500 billion, surpassing Musk’s SpaceX at $400 billion and pushing TikTok parent ByteDance into third place at $220 billion. For context, OpenAI was valued at just $300 billion earlier this year.
The windfall comes in the middle of OpenAI’s deal frenzy, aiming at securing funding for its massive AI infrastructure project, Stargate. The initiative is a four-year, $500 billion plan to build data centers across the U.S. with partners like Oracle and SoftBank. The project was first announced at a splashy White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump in January.
Last month, OpenAI announced that five new Stargate data centers, along with the project’s flagship site in Abilene, Texas, and other ongoing projects, would bring Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years.
“AI can only fulfill its promise if we build the compute to power it. That compute is the key to ensuring everyone can benefit from AI and to unlocking future breakthroughs,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a press release announcing the new sites.
On his personal blog, Altman claimed that if the industry can’t reach 10 gigawatts of compute, it may have to decide which AI applications take priority.
Additionally, OpenAI also recently signed deals with Nvidia, Samsung, and SK Hynix to help source chips for its data centers. Nvidia alone said it would be investing up to $100 billion in the company.
The news of OpenAI’s big valuation bump dropped the same week Elon Musk became the first person to hit a $500 billion net worth — it’s since ticked down to $499 billion.
Most of Musk’s fortune is tied up in Tesla, where he owns about 12% of the company’s stock. Tesla is one of the most valuable public companies with a market cap of $1.4 trillion. Its board even recently offered Musk a $1 trillion pay package to keep him focused.
But Musk’s relationship with OpenAI, the company he helped start back in 2015, has soured. He’s been in a very public feud with CEO Sam Altman, even filing a lawsuit last year in federal court in Northern California, accusing Altman and OpenAI of fraud. Musk says he was duped into funding what he thought would remain a nonprofit research lab.
Instead, the lawsuit alleges, Altman quietly built a secretive network of for-profit OpenAI affiliates, took control of the non-profit’s board, engaged in self-dealing, and diverted the non-profit’s talent and tech for financial gain.
And while OpenAI’s valuation keeps rocketing higher, Sam Altman himself is still only worth about $20 million, according to Forbes.