Arielle Pardes, writing for Business Insider back in July (paywalled; try Reader Mode or Apple News+):

Say you joined Anthropic in 2024. The company offers you a competitive compensation package: a $400,000 salary and $1.3 million in equity. You’re feeling pretty cush.

Flash forward to July 2026. In the two years that you’ve worked there, the company’s valuation has grown from $18 billion to $965 billion. With Anthropic on the precipice of a public stock market debut, your equity in turn has ballooned by more than 5,000% to $72 million. Even by Bay Area tech standards, you have won the lottery.

This example — taken from a real midlevel member of the technical staff — is not anomalous. Thousands of employees at Anthropic and OpenAI are now watching their equity accounts inflate to stupefying heights. One former OpenAI employee, who spent less than three years at the company and whose equity is now worth more than $50 million, tells me he has a hard time comprehending this scale of wealth, which is “way beyond what I even know what to do with.”

Many of these folks are in the early to middle part of their careers, and this is where they’re starting their wealth accumulation. Most people would be thrilled to end their careers of 30, 40, 50 years with even a quarter of those amounts.

I’ve long suggested to friends that San Francisco is slowly becoming a playground of the ultrawealthy, where centimillionaires frolic while the low-wage workers they rely on commute in from far outside the city, and longtime residents struggle to stay put. A West Coast Monaco, if you will. This might accelerate that trend.