OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion of company stock to investors. The company’s value spiked to $500 billion, leaving Elon Musk’s $400 billion worth of SpaceX behind. It happened only a day after Musk became the first person in history to reach a $500 billion net worth.
Summary
- The company assisted its current and former employees in selling their stocks to investors. As the operation was completed, OpenAI’s valuation grew from $300 billion to $500 billion.
- According to Artemis CEO Jon Ma, if Tether were to go public, it would have had a $515 billion value. However, the Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino hasn’t expressed interest in going public yet.
- Despite being the startup with the highest market cap, OpenAI is still an unprofitable company. By some estimates, OpenAI may spend trillions of dollars on building data centers.
- Simultaneous boost of OpenAI and the stablecoin space may speed up the mass adoption of OpenAI’s products.
OpenAI is in its transition phase
According to Bloomberg’s unnamed source, stock buyers included Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp., T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. The latter company’s reps called MGX a core partner to OpenAI.
OpenAI topped the list of the most valued companies amidst negotiations with Microsoft Corp. aimed to turn OpenAI into a more conventional for-profit company.
In August, OpenAI released a gpt-oss app that can run on user devices for free. Use cases include data analysis, trading bots, and others. The app can be seen as a DeepSeek competitor whose breakthrough LLM was released earlier this year.
Currently, the company is promoting its iOS app Sora 2, a video-generating tool released on Sep. 30.
For OpenAI, a dramatic increase in its funds is crucial as the company’s competitors (first of all, Meta Platforms Inc.) aggressively try to seduce OpenAI’s employees via more generous paychecks. In June 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed Meta Platforms offered his startup workers $100 million bonuses if hired. This marks how high the stakes are at the AI talent hunt.
Initially, OpenAI was started as a non-profit organization aimed at benefiting humanity through the use and development of artificial intelligence. How, with an app like Sora 2 under the belt, the initial goals of the company are questioned. As AI-generated, realistically looking videos are hitting social media, many people express disdain about them.
The disruptive effects of ChatGPT have contributed to the AI breakthrough of the 2020s, drawing both praise and criticism and raising a lot of new questions, like AI taking humans’ jobs, AI-made art, etc.
AI agents and stablecoins
Much is being said about how stablecoins and AI agents will boost each other’s adoption. As stablecoins are typically seen as a perfect on-ramp in the crypto space, now, they are also seen as an AI world gateway currency. The main reason for this is that stablecoins can scale with the fast-paced AI development.
On the one hand, stablecoins are borderless, cheap, and fast enough to go hand in glove with the AI boom. On the other hand, they are getting adopted by the traditional finance sector, onboarding masses of people effortlessly. It is expected that stablecoins may become the handiest tool for monetization of bots.
As autonomous AI agents start making financial decisions on behalf of humans and organizations, they will need money. Many experts see stablecoins as the perfect fit for such a case, as stablecoin payments won’t need human participation. AI agents won’t be able to use fiat money, as they cannot be KYCed. That’s where stablecoins enter the arena.
The Galaxy Digital CEO, Michael Novogratz, predicts that “in the not-so-distant future, the biggest user of stablecoins is going to be AI.”
According to him and other experts, most of the stablecoin transactions will be made by AI agents. As for now, the CEX.io researchers point out that bots are responsible for 70% of stablecoin circulation volume.
Given all that, the growing fund base of OpenAI may speed up the development and mass adoption of its products. At the same time, stablecoin regulatory improvements may bring us closer to the point where both technologies will unite to shape the new financial reality.
Such laws as MiCA and the GENIUS Act in Europe and the U.S., respectively, help stablecoin issuers to better understand how to maintain their business. China and other huge economies are considering joining the race too.
Source: https://crypto.news/openai-beats-spacex-worlds-highest-market-cap/