Live footage of Elon before posting “Scam Altman” for the millionth time on Twitter:

Sam Altman pretty much just stole Elon Musk's girlfriend and sidechick on the same night. OpenAI, the once-wholesome nonprofit that was supposed to “benefit humanity” (cue Sarah McLachlan music), is now dancing around with a $500 billion valuation. For those keeping track (and I know you are), that puts it ahead of Musk’s SpaceX, which suddenly looks like the other co-founder’s little side project. (I’m guessing Elon's biggest wish is that he could go back to 2018 and be more patient with Sammie boy and his developer team).

So how’d Altman pull it off? Not an IPO, not a mega-round. Nope. This was a secondary share sale… pretty much a garage sale for insiders (at retail prices). Employees and staffers unloaded $6.6 billion worth of stock to Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price.

(Source: Bloomberg)

But while some employees cashed out, only two-thirds of the stock OpenAI offered actually got sold. Clearly: insiders think holding is the smarter move than chasing SoftBank’s Uber-money today. Either they believe in the future… or they just don’t want to pay San Francisco’s tax bill this year (probably both).

The deal shoves OpenAI’s sticker price way past SpaceX’s $400B valuation. Even funnier? OpenAI still hasn’t posted a profit. But why bother when Microsoft and Oracle are busy writing you checks like you’re their unemployed nephew with a “music career.”

Meanwhile, competition is heating up fast. Nvidia’s printing money selling GPUs to anyone with a pulse, Meta is waving around nine-figure comp packages to poach researchers, and Anthropic’s raising money so fast it looks like a pyramid scheme with better branding. On the other hand, OpenAI is trying to stay in front by dropping GPT-5 in August and releasing models that “reason”... aka confidently spit out wrong answers. And China’s DeepSeek is right there breathing down their neck, trying to pull of the biggest upset in tech history.

But make no mistake about it, this whole thing is deliciously awkward for Elon. Remember, he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman before being shown the door in 2018 (read: giving up on Altman’s vision). Now, the company he helped start is not only richer than SpaceX, it’s also in talks with Microsoft to fully convert into a for-profit public benefit corporation… a move Musk has been going full Louis Litt to stop (suing, if you haven’t watched Suits).

And if you’re a Tesla shareholder, this might just be another L to hold… especially if it ends up ironically nudging Elon even further down the AI/robot rabbit hole while the EV business (aka the one that actually makes money) gets left charging in the corner of the garage.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla as mentioned in the article.