OpenAI Becomes the World's Most Valuable Private Company, Overtaking SpaceX

OpenAI has officially become the world's most valuable privately held company. This was achieved after selling shares owned by current and former employees for US$6.6 billion. According to a Bloomberg report, the share sale involving SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital, and others increased OpenAI's valuation to US$500 billion.  Previously, OpenAI's valuation was around US$300 billion.

This figure was recorded in August 2025, shortly after OpenAI secured US$40 billion in funding led by SoftBank et al.

Well, OpenAI's valuation makes the company led by Sam Altman the most "expensive" non-public company in the world.

According to Yahoo Finance data, the top three most valuable private companies today are OpenAI, SpaceX, a rocket company, with a valuation of around US$451 billion, and Anthropic, an AI company, with a Valuation of around US$178 billion.

New strategy to increase valuation. Typically, a company's valuation increases with a funding round. However, OpenAI isn't a funding round, but rather a secondary transaction that provides liquidity to internal shareholders. 

This transaction model is becoming increasingly popular among large U.S. startups. It not only rewards employees but also helps retain existing AI talent within the company. 

This is considered a crucial step, considering that OpenAI is currently in tight competition with Meta and Google in recruiting AI researchers.

Meta is reportedly offering a "nine-figure" compensation package (equivalent to hundreds of millions of US dollars) as an enticement to attract OpenAI talent to work at Meta. 

Besides increasing valuations and retaining employees, this share sale is also arguably quite important for OpenAI's future plans.  

Recently, they planned to spend US$300 billion (around Rp. 4,980 trillion) in five years to build Oracle's cloud infrastructure.

They also established a strategic partnership with chip manufacturer Nvidia, and the company is reportedly planning to invest up to US$100 billion (around Rp. 1,660 trillion) in OpenAI. 

Furthermore, OpenAI will also partner with memory manufacturer SK Hynix to increase the supply of memory chips .

This additional valuation will certainly make OpenAI even more developed and productive by introducing new features and products.   

Last August, the company released GPT-5, its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model yet, designed to write, think, and code with reasoning abilities claimed to be closer to human-like. 

This week, OpenAI also introduced Sora 2, a new generative video model that aims to produce more realistic videos with accurate movement, synchronized audio, and interactive features, such as inserting people into videos. 

In addition to generative AI models, OpenAI also made a splash with the release of Sora, a social media platform entirely powered by AI-generated content. This app was released simultaneously with Sora 2.

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