Here’s the part that matters: two AI startups, Anthropic and OpenAI, are on the edge of IPOs, and their employees are watching equity values leap to levels that feel almost unreal. The article’s illustrative example is a midlevel technical staffer who joined Anthropic in 2024, with a $400,000 salary and $1.3 million in equity. In just two years, the company’s valuation grew from $18 billion to $965 billion. By July 2026, that employee’s equity balloons by more than 5,000% to $72 million. That is the baseline for a coming “wealth tsunami,” not the outlier.

The compounding effect is what’s so disruptive. The article says thousands of employees at Anthropic and OpenAI are watching their equity accounts inflate to stupefying heights, and it points to a former OpenAI employee who spent less than three years there but whose equity is now worth more than $50 million. It also frames this as a split within the city: there’s “regular rich,” and then there’s stratospherically rich. For context on scale, the article notes that the largest lottery jackpot in California history, paid out in 2022, totaled $2 billion. By comparison, it states that Anthropic’s seven cofounders will be worth more than $15 billion each, and it adds that Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, holds equity now valued at about $30 billion. In other words, this is not just “tech is doing well.” It is concentrated, compounding wealth creation with a timetable attached.

So what are employees actually monetizing, and why does it matter beyond billionaire math? The article says it is not only paychecks getting bigger. For most employees, the wealth is primarily in equity, not salary. It cites an analysis from Hill.com that tracks private market transactions, and it claims that if these companies go public, thousands of employees become multimillionaires overnight. It further quotes wealth advisor Tushar Kumar, founder of Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors, who works with clients at OpenAI and Anthropic: “The level of wealth I'm seeing with these two companies is like nothing I've seen in my career.” Then comes the uncomfortable detail for corporate planners: Kumar says clients are “shocked” by what they now have available, and he emphasizes that the equity is usually the dominant portion of the gains. The article reports that the average equity grant among OpenAI’s roughly 5,000 employees is $1.5 million, and it provides cross-functional examples, including research scientists with PhDs and even a chef overseeing OpenAI’s cafeterias whose net worth is reportedly more than $10 million.

That creates a weird second-order reality for the city itself. Vijay Chattha, who owns VSC, a public relations firm for tech companies, describes the mood shift as dual energy: “Depending on your position, it could be the best of times or a time of great anxiety,” and he says he’s “never seen something like this in my life, where something has such a dual energy to it.” The article then ties wealth creation to housing outcomes, citing Redfin’s estimate that, post-IPO, Anthropic and OpenAI employees will collectively be worth enough to buy nearly a third of all the homes in the San Francisco metro area. If your job touches real estate, benefits, recruiting, or local consumer demand, this is not a cultural side story. It is a market structure event.

And the question executives should not ignore is whether the wealth wave lifts everyone or just bids the rest of the city out of the market. The article raises both possibilities directly: will AI wealth permanently price out have-nots, displacing San Franciscans who work outside the AI industry, or will it be a flood that lifts all boats? It also reports a planning hesitation among employees, suggesting psychological friction even among the newly wealthy. Financial planner Alex Caswell says his clients are hesitant to make concrete plans “as if afraid to jinx it and pop the AI bubble.” That caution shows up in behavior. The article says Caswell reports some clients were planning to sell stock and reinvest in index funds, while the “wildest plans” involved quitting because jobs are described as “incredibly stressful,” and “almost every single one of them wants to retire early.” On the philanthropic angle, Anthropic offers a matching program for employees who donate up to 25% of their equity to charitable causes, and the article says some clients use it, but most are not factoring charity into their plans. Instead, many are planning to invest in startups or start their own.

All of that wealth flow lands somewhere first, and in the article, it’s real estate. Stoyan Panayotov, founder of Babylon Wealth Management with clients at OpenAI, says it’s especially common that a “very young cohort of engineers” is buying their first home. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s housing market is described as heated enough that AI money is colliding with it, creating the sense that AI wealth makes it impossible for others to own homes. The article cites rent spikes over the last year and says buying a house is challenging even for really rich people. It offers a concrete affordability example from a luxury real estate agent, Helena Zaludova: a home that could be bought for about $2.3 million last year is now somewhere between $3 million and $3.5 million, with buyers needing to be competitive. It also states that the median price of a single-family home in San Francisco is now $2 million, the highest of any city in the United States. Zaludova rejects the idea that AI companies are the direct cause, saying the market is “more intense than I've seen before, but also totally logical,” and that it reflects a long-awaited rebound after the pandemic, a “way overdue correction.” Executives should still take the lesson: even if AI is not the sole cause, the timing and velocity of new money can accelerate how quickly affordability breaks.

There is also an employment and confidence spillover into broader tech. The article notes that while Anthropic and OpenAI are growing, leasing bigger office spaces and hiring more employees, their growth is offset by massive layoffs across the tech industry at large. At the same time, it says wealth levels that used to be extraordinary are now average, and tech workers outside AI worry they could be part of a “rapidly downward middle class.” It even points to doctors and lawyers with $400,000 salaries taking on second jobs, like training AI, to support themselves, and it implies non-tech residents are catching the stress too, as “the rest of the city” absorbs the shock. If you’re a board member, CFO, or finance lead at a company in the same ecosystem, the strategic stakes are clear: the IPO wealth wave is not only about liquidity. It changes how people plan, how quickly housing markets reprice, and how expensive it becomes to retain talent across the region.

The “wealth tsunami” framing is provocative, but the mechanics in the article are concrete: huge equity revaluations near IPO timing, employees primarily rich in equity, and early wealth flows concentrated in housing and risk-taking. San Francisco has historically been a place where people come to get rich since the Gold Rush, but the article says this cycle differs because the scale is larger and the wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. The next move for any executive is to understand that this money will behave differently than past tech booms, and that uncertainty itself, including fear of the bubble “popping,” can affect hiring, spending, and workplace stability even before the first shares trade.