TL;DR: Around 75 current and former OpenAI employees became overnight multimillionaires last fall after each cashing out the maximum $30 million in company stock, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. They were among the 600-plus workers who collectively pocketed $6.6 billion in what was likely the largest pre-IPO liquidity event in tech history. And it could be the warmup to even bigger windfalls if OpenAI and Anthropic go public later this year.

What happened: That $6.6 billion means that, on average, each qualifying OpenAI employee walked away with about $11 million last October—putting them near the top 1% of wealth in the US. For many, it was the first chance to cash out, as OpenAI requires a two-year hold on shares. After maxing out the sale cap, some employees reportedly parked their remaining shares in donor-advised funds, a charitable giving account that lets them take tax deductions and also swerves the capital gains tax, according to the WSJ.

The AI era has already minted plenty of billionaires, mostly founders and VCs. But such share sales are creating a class of AI nouveau riche who were, until recently, just salaried workers.

Now or never: What’s also eyebrow-raising is how much cash cleared before OpenAI even goes public—atypical in Silicon Valley. But just a glance at recent history could hint at why. During the dot-com boom, many employees had to wait to sell even after their company went public—and lost much of their paper fortunes when the bubble popped. (See also: crypto and NFT wealth that looked fat in that digital wallet and then largely vanished overnight.) And the sell-off comes amid a growing anxiety that if you don’t set yourself up financially now, you’ll be left behind in a “permanent underclass” as AI replaces jobs.

The coming flood: Per the WSJ, this is just a “sneak peek” of what’s coming once OpenAI and Anthropic IPO. OpenAI is now worth around $852 billion and could reportedly target a $1 trillion-plus valuation upon going public. Meanwhile, Anthropic is in talks to raise funds that would value it at around $900 billion pre-IPO.

AI wealth has already infused the Bay Area, with housing prices jumping 14% in the past year—not so surprising when Meta offers $300 million pay packages for top talent and OpenAI lists salaries that exceed $500,000. (AI stock is so in-demand right now that one investment banker is trying to swap his Bay Area mansion for Anthropic shares.)

Bottom line: With such record-breaking IPOs on the horizon (ones that would let employees sell beyond any company-set cap), we might see a new class of haves and have-nots for the AI era—and it won’t just be the people running the firms. —WK

The secret button on the back of your iPhone

The back of your iPhone looks like a dead zone—an Apple logo, some cameras, and not much else. Turns out it's also been a shortcut button this whole time.

A feature called Back Tap lets you double- or triple-tap the back of your iPhone to trigger a range of actions—like turning on your flashlight before you feel your way down the stairs in the dark or opening your Kindle the moment you settle into your train seat. You can also assign it to take a screenshot, pull up your front camera, or scroll down a page—there are dozens of options.

To set it up: Go to Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap → then click on Double Tap or Triple Tap to assign an action.

Once you've used it a few times, you'll start wondering what else you've been ignoring on the back of your phone. (For now, just the Apple logo. But still.) —SM

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Forget Davos and Sun Valley—the buzziest conference room for tech deals is now a glorified garage in Miami. The F1 paddock is where startups are flocking to shake hands on lucrative contracts, and for these founders, the actual racing takes a backseat to the hobnobbing—one told TechCrunch that he didn’t even watch the main event. Deals are reportedly getting hammered out on the helicopter ride to the racetrack, and a VC firm even cut a formal partnership with F1 where its portfolio companies are introduced to big buyers during the multiday event.

The six-figure price tag for a weekend in the paddock also functions as a velvet rope: It guarantees a roomful of deep-pocketed investors and hungry tech startups looking to skip the cold email. The sponsors advertised on the cars and drivers’ suits show how times have changed—oil and tobacco companies have been lapped by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, and Palantir. It’s only a matter of time before drivers chug their podium champagne in front of a giant Claude logo. —WK

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