Elon Musk says OpenAI’s compensation is ‘lavish.’ Here’s how much employees get paid.

Elon Musk, left, has added Microsoft to a lawsuit accusing the firm and OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, right, of anticompetitive practices.

Elon Musk is doubling down on his lawsuit against OpenAI, and he’s taking issue with what they pay employees.

Musk added Microsoft and Reid Hoffman, who is a Microsoft board member and former OpenAI board member, as defendants in his lawsuit against OpenAI. Microsoft has poured nearly $14 billion in OpenAI, including a $10 billion investment it announced last year.

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 but has since severed ties and become one of its most biggest critics. He left its board in 2018 and created his own AI company, xAI, last year.

In his complaint, Musk alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft are engaging in anticompetitive practices, including “lavish compensation,” to corner the market on generative AI.

“OpenAI has attempted to starve competitors of AI talent by aggressively recruiting employees with offers of lavish compensation, and is on track to spend $1.5 billion on personnel for just 1,500 employees,” his lawyers wrote in the amended complaint.

So just how much does OpenAI pay its employees?

Since it’s a private company, OpenAI isn’t required to report compensation data in the way public companies must. But we have some indicators.

Levels.fyi, which tracks compensation data at tech firms and startups, says total yearly compensation at OpenAI ranges from $144,275 for a technical writer to $1,338,750 for a software engineer. OpenAI’s median yearly total compensation is $534,197, according to data reported on the tracker.

For software engineers specifically, the median yearly total compensation reported on Levels.fyi is $810,000 at OpenAI compared to $257,500 in the tech hub of the San Francisco Bay Area more broadly.

Levels.fyi says it mostly uses self-reported user data but also verifies some reported compensation with documents like offer letters and pay statements that users can choose to submit.

The most common salary range for an engineering role on OpenAI’s website, not including stock awards or bonuses, is $200,000 to $370,000, Roger Lee, co-founder of compensation benchmarking firm Comprehensive.io, told Bloomberg last year. Compensation in listings for more specialized positions were higher at $300,000 to $450,000, he added.

Amid the generative AI boom, the industry has largely enjoyed higher pay and greater job security against mass layoffs than the rest of the tech sector outside of AI.

OpenAI, Microsoft, and Hoffman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk first sued OpenAI and its cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in March, accusing the company of deviating from its “founding agreement” to be nonprofit by partnering with Microsoft. OpenAI responded that the lawsuit was “incoherent” and “contradictory.”

Musk dropped his lawsuit without explanation in June before filing the latest suit in August, arguing that OpenAI now prioritizes commercial interests over its original goal of building AI that’s beneficial for humanity and claiming he was “deceived” into cofounding the company. OpenAI in 2019 introduced a “capped-profit” arm, and in September said it’s moving towards a for-profit governance structure.