What happened
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and one of the four co-founders who set up the lab in 2015, confirmed in court testimony Tuesday that his equity stake in the company is worth approximately $7 billion. Crypto Briefing reported the figure from the proceedings, which are tied to the broader litigation around OpenAI's corporate restructuring and its drift from the original nonprofit-controlled charter.
Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 and founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. weeks later, but his founder shares in OpenAI carried over. The $7B figure assumes a valuation in the ballpark of the company's most recent tender-led marks, which put OpenAI north of $300B on paper.
It's the first time a sitting or former OpenAI insider has put a hard dollar number on personal exposure in a sworn setting, rather than through anonymous secondary-market leaks.
Why it matters
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. It bolted on a capped-profit subsidiary in 2019 so it could raise from Microsoft and others without abandoning the mission language entirely. The firm is now trying to convert that structure into something closer to a conventional for-profit, a move that's drawn formal attention from the California and Delaware attorneys general and a separate civil challenge from Elon Musk.
Sutskever's $7B disclosure cuts through the abstraction. It's a single number that tells regulators, employees, and the public exactly what's at stake for the people who built the lab. The headline says co-founder.