OpenAI Buys $7B in Employee Stock, Holds Valuation at $852B

OpenAI has bought back roughly $7 billion of shares from current and former employees at an $852 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. That price is unchanged from the company's most recent primary funding round.

The telling part is who is paying. Rather than lining up outside investors to absorb the secondary stock, OpenAI used its own balance sheet. That is a different posture from a growth-stage tender: instead of letting private-market demand set a new mark, the company is spending cash to give employees liquidity at last round's price.

The trajectory around that flat print is steep. OpenAI moved from a $157 billion valuation in October 2024, to $300 billion in March 2025, to $500 billion via an employee tender in October 2025 that Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX and T. Rowe Price bought into, and then to $852 billion after the March 2026 round closed. Holding the line at $852 billion this month is the first flat print in that run, and it follows a long tail of OpenAI coverage on our tracker.

The backdrop is a potential Wall Street debut. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC in June 2026, working with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan, and Sam Altman told staff via Slack he expects the company to go public within the next year. A self-funded buyback lets long-tenured employees take cash off the table without producing a fresh outside price print that a roadshow would then have to defend.

The reporting does not say how many employees sold, what proportion of vested stock they could tender, or how the outlay lines up against the $5.7 billion of Q1 2026 revenue and roughly $3.7 billion of cash burn cited in earlier coverage. Those figures will matter more than the headline dollar number once the S-1 becomes public.