I realize you have a bias against Sam Altman but lets dig into your current statement. The NYT article you are quoting I believe is this one [1], in which it describes Ilya Sutskever making $1.8 million in salary. I am not sure exactly what you are trying to say but from the beginning the equity has not been part of the comp of OpenAI. Salary as far as I know is typically just that, the cash compensation excluding bonus and stock.
I don't know exactly how employee contracts are drawn up there but OpenAI has been pretty vocal that all the for-profit sides have caps which eventually lead back to 100% going into the non-profit after hitting the cap or the initial investment amount. So I am not quite clear what you are saying? Salary is cash, equity is stock. There has always been profit caps on the stock.
My only point was that you made an argument about employees giving up their equity for "mediocre" MSFT stock. It is just a misinformed statement that I was clearing up for you. 1) MSFT has been doing amazing as a stock 2) Employee equity has profit caps. 3) Employees who actually care about equity profit would most likely be more interested in joining MSFT.
Im referencing large PPU grants in OpenAI offers, with 4 year vests, they sure made it feel like regular employees are being given a chance to join now and be millionaires via theirs PPUs
If this was never true, that’s on the OpenAI team that misled their engineers
This isn’t personally against you but they never had the $1M/year they flaunted when Sam the savior was their CEO