OpenAI, Anthropic IPOs widen SF's $180K tech wealth gap

A San Francisco tech worker earning $180,000 a year, comfortably in the top 20% of American households, told the New York Times they "feel a little bit like I'm not good enough to live here anymore" because they don't work at an AI company. They've since moved to Carnelian Bay, on Lake Tahoe. That single quote is doing a lot of work in the piece, and it gets at something the salary numbers alone don't quite capture.

The numbers do help frame it. Mean annual pay in San Francisco was $196,365 last year, up from $153,359 in 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited in the article. Over the same stretch, the city's average apartment rent climbed to $3,827 a month, enough to overtake New York as the nation's most expensive. So nominal pay rose meaningfully, and it still doesn't feel like enough to a chunk of the workforce.

The reason, per the reporting, is the gap opening above them. OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in San Francisco and valued at close to $1 trillion, are preparing to go public. Together with Elon Musk's newly public SpaceX, they could mint more than 20 new billionaires from current and former employees, according to a Sacra analysis quoted in the piece. For scale, the article notes that Uber's 2019 IPO came in around $82 billion, more than ten times smaller than what OpenAI and Anthropic are now estimated at. The SF Standard has been tracking the same setup, and the SF Examiner picked up the NYT thread as well.

The honest caveat is that this is largely a story told through worker anecdotes plus one private-markets projection. The 20-plus billionaires figure is Sacra's estimate, contingent on IPO pricing that hasn't happened yet, and the reporting doesn't quantify how many engineers have actually left the city versus said they might. Take the specifics as reported, not as settled.

What is worth watching is the timing. The paper wealth here only turns into spendable cash on an IPO event, and that's the moment the bidding wars and condo crunches the article describes get a second leg. If you're hiring outside the frontier-AI cluster in SF, or trying to keep a non-AI engineer who already runs the rent math every month, that's the calendar that matters.