The $852 Billion Secret That Just Got Out

OpenAI's cap table has leaked. The CEO owns nothing. SoftBank is up fifty billion dollars. And the entity sitting at the very top of the ownership pyramid is a nonprofit that nobody fully understands.

Someone leaked the most important document in tech finance right now.

A reconstructed cap table for OpenAI Group PBC, labeled strictly confidential, has been landing in inboxes across Silicon Valley, New York, and the sovereign wealth offices of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. What’s inside it is stranger, more concentrated, and more structurally bizarre than anyone had guessed.

The post-money valuation: $852 billion. The round size committed: $122 billion. And sitting in the CEO row: Sam Altman. TBD across every column.

The person running the most valuable private company in history has no confirmed equity position in it.

Four things stopped us cold when we first saw this:

Sam Altman’s entire row reads TBD. Ownership, value, cost basis, return multiple. All blank. The notes say only “equity grant pending as part of PBC conversion.” The CEO of an $852 billion company has no confirmed stake in it.

SoftBank committed ~$64.6 billion for 11.75% of the cap table and is already sitting on $34.7 billion in unrealized gains before the round has even technically closed. One of the fastest paper returns in institutional investing history, earned in under twelve months.

The OpenAI Foundation sits at the top of the entire ownership structure with 2.6 billion shares it paid nothing for. Its cost basis is zero. Its unrealized gain is $219.8 billion. Its return multiple is listed as infinity. And nobody outside the boardroom fully understands what happens to that equity when OpenAI eventually goes public.

The full investor roster is visible for the first time. From Microsoft’s 17.6x return down to a row labeled “Early Angels, Heavily Diluted” sitting on ~140x, every position is here. And what it tells you about how this company was actually built is not the story anyone has been telling publicly.

Here is what we are sharing below for paid subscribers:

• Every shareholder, share count, and return multiple from the reconstructed cap table, broken down by category.

• The Sam Altman situation, what "TBD" actually means and the three theories about why the CEO of an $852 billion company has no confirmed equity position.

• The SoftBank numbers, how a $64.6 billion entry at $730B pre-money became a $50 billion paper gain before the round even closed.

• The nonprofit structure, why the OpenAI Foundation’s position at the top of the cap table raises governance questions that nobody has clean answers to.

• The conviction timing premium, why the funds that moved earliest are sitting on 30x, 43x, and 140x returns while later entrants are looking at 3x.

• What this all means for the IPO, and which shareholders are sitting on the most uncomfortable positions heading into a public offering.

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OpenAI’s Full Cap Table