[ghushn3]

I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.

[recipe19]

These aren't annual pay packages. It's some "can't retire on that" base salary plus a promise of gradually vesting equity on a multi-year schedule. For public companies, you'll get that amount if you hang around for x years and there is no sudden decline in market price. For non-public companies (OpenAI), the equity is more pie-in-the-sky.

[xandrius]

I'd expect a few millions of annual pay, anyone could retire on that. Whether someone wants to, it's different but having anything beyond $1M available is definitely sufficient, especially if you're sub-40.

[yunohn]

Most sources confirmed that yearly effective pay would be 100M level, unlike the normal tech breakdown.

OpenAI doesn’t do the usual equity for employees, they famously do profit sharing.

[Buttons840]

You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.

[freejazz]

Jeez!

[udev4096]

A fellow sell-out. Welcome. Those are in abundance, having no honor and ethics

[joshdavham]

This is a great point, but some passions fundamentally require other people and capital.

These AI researchers fundamentally need access to tons of compute, data and engineers in order to pursue their passion.

[shostack]

Eh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.