Word's out that OpenAI is sitting on a ridiculous employee stock grant pool—we're talking $50 billion. That's roughly 10% of their $500 billion valuation as of last October. Pretty wild when you think about it. The move shows just how far these mega-cap tech companies will go to keep their best people locked in. Stock options and equity grants have become the new chess game in Silicon Valley. With competition for top-tier talent absolutely brutal across AI, crypto, and Web3 spaces, companies are literally betting billions on retention through ownership stakes. It's a strategy that filters down across the entire tech sector—the bigger your equity pool, the better your shot at securing the engineers and researchers everyone's hunting for.