A $130B nonprofit that gave away $7.5M

When OpenAI converted to a public benefit corporation last October, the nonprofit that controls it kept a 26% stake. At the company's valuation that slice is worth roughly $130 billion, which most coverage calls the largest nonprofit endowment in the United States. The year before the conversion, that same nonprofit gave away $7.5 million.

No law forces it to spend a cent: unlike an ordinary private foundation, it has no minimum payout requirement. It has pledged $1 billion this year against a stated $25 billion long-term.

Almost none of the $130 billion is cash. It is the paper value of equity in a single company, and the entity is not legally structured as a private foundation — so it carries no minimum annual payout requirement, the rule that forces ordinary foundations to spend a slice of their assets every year. What it has committed is a pledge: at least $1 billion in giving over the coming year, against a stated $25 billion long-term.

The first sizeable outlay, announced in May, is $250 million for what it calls economic futures — research into how to spread the gains from AI. The memo's reference points are telling: Alaska's oil-funded Permanent Fund, Norway's sovereign wealth fund, and the idea of shifting taxation away from labor and toward capital. The company whose product is built to do work once done by people is now funding the study of how to tax the capital that does it instead.