How much money OpenAI employees make while Elon Musk calls it ‘lavish’

Elon Musk is doubling down on his lawsuit against OpenAI and he’s objecting to what they pay employees.

Musk added Microsoft and Reid Hoffmana Microsoft board member and former OpenAI board member, as defendants in his lawsuit against OpenAI. Microsoft has poured nearly $14 billion into OpenAI, including a $10 billion investment it announced last year.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but has since cut ties and become one of its biggest critics. He left the board in 2018 and created his own AI company, xAIlast year.

In his complaint, Musk alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft are engaging in anti-competitive practices, including “abundant compensation,” to corner the market for generative AI.

“OpenAI has attempted to starve competitors of AI talent by aggressively recruiting workers with offers of generous compensation, and is on track to spend $1.5 billion on staffing just 1,500 employees,” its lawyers wrote in the amended complaint.

How much does OpenAI pay its employees?

Because it is a private company, OpenAI is not required to report compensation data the way public companies are required to do so. But we have some indicators.

Levels.fyi, which tracks compensation data at tech companies and startups, say Total annual compensation at OpenAI ranges from $144,275 for a technical writer to $1,338,750 for a software engineer. OpenAI’s average annual total compensation is $534,197, according to data reported on the tracker.

For software engineers in particular, the average annual total compensation reported on Levels.fyi is $810,000 at OpenAI, compared to $257,500 in the technology hub of the San Francisco Bay Area more broadly.

Levels.fyi say It primarily uses self-reported user data, but also verifies some reported compensation with documents such as offer letters and pay statements that users can submit.

The most common salary range for a technical role on OpenAI’s website, not including stock awards or bonuses, is $200,000 to $370,000, says Roger Lee, co-founder of compensation benchmarking company Comprehensive.io, told Bloomberg last year. Compensation in listings for more specialized positions was higher, from $300,000 to $450,000, he added.

Amid the generative AI boom, the sector has largely enjoyed higher wages and greater job security against mass layoffs than the rest of the tech sector outside AI.

OpenAI, Microsoft and Hoffman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk first OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have been sued in March accused the company of deviating from its “founding agreement” to be nonprofit by partnering with Microsoft. OpenAI has responded to this the lawsuit was “incoherent” and “contradictory”.

Musk dropped his lawsuit without explanation the previous June filing the latest lawsuit in Augustarguing that OpenAI is now prioritizing commercial interests over its original goal of building AI that benefits humanity, and claiming he was “misled” into co-founding the company. OpenAI introduced a “capped profit” branch in 2019, saying in September that this is so towards a for-profit governance structure.