Ilya Sutskever Net Worth Explained: Fast-Growing Safe SuperIntelligence Could Make AI Founder a Billionaire in 2025

Key Takeaways

• Ilya Sutskever founded Safe SuperIntelligence (SSI) after leaving OpenAI.
• According to reports, SSI is in talks to raise money at a $20 billion valuation.
• The mammoth funding round could make Sutskever extremely wealthy.

With AI startup Safe SuperIntelligence in talks to raise funding at a $20 billion valuation, its co-founders could be on course for a significant windfall.

While the arrangement between co-founders Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy isn’t public knowledge, media attention has focused on Sutskever, who left his role as OpenAI’s chief scientist to found SSI in 2024.

OpenAI’s Star Researcher Who Branched Out on His Own

A student of AI godfather and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of machine learning.

His early work focused on computer vision, including the 2012 design of AlexNet, a seminal AI architecture developed in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.

In 2013, Sutskever was hired as a research scientist at Google Brain, where he made key contributions to the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm, TensorFlow and AlphaGo.

When a group of Silicon Valley investors including Sam Altman and Elon Musk set about building OpenAI in 2015, they recruited Sutskever as part of a concerted effort to bring together some of the brightest minds in AI.

In the nine years he spent as OpenAI’s chief scientist, Sutskever oversaw many of the company’s most significant breakthroughs, including the development of ChatGPT.

Between Sutskever’s impressive applied and academic research credentials and Gross’ renowned business acumen, SSI managed to raise $1 billion in 2024.

If the latest funding talks succeed, SSI is on track to become one of the most valuable AI startups in the game.

Sources of Ilya Sutskever’s Wealth

Presumably, Sutskever’s net worth can mostly be attributed to his stake in SSI and any remaining equity he holds in OpenAI.

While the exact details of OpenAI’s compensation scheme aren’t a matter of public knowledge, the company gave employees at least two chances to cash out in February and December 2024.

Due to its non-profit roots, OpenAI isn’t like other startups, and it isn’t clear whether its founders have any significant stake in the company. Meanwhile, previous tender offers have capped payments to employee shareholders at $10 million each.

That being said, as one of 11 co-founders, Sutskever’s equity is likely to be at the higher end of the spectrum. And even a 0.1% stake could be worth hundreds of millions based on OpenAI’s latest reported valuation of $260 billion .

Moving on to SSI, the size of Sutskever’s stake is also unknown.

Let’s say the three co-founders formed SSI as equal partners and the first two funding rounds allocate 50% to investors (the first round reportedly allocated 20%).

That would mean Sutskever still owns nearly 17% of the company.  Based on these assumptions, his stake would be worth $3.4 billion.

Ilya Sutskever’s Net Worth

Given that most of his wealth is tied up in private equity of unknown size, calculating Sutskever’s net worth is difficult.

With OpenAI’s unconventional structure and uncertainties over its transition to a for-profit model, it isn’t a given that its founders are sitting on billions of dollars worth of equity. But tens or even hundreds of millions is certainly within the realm of possibility.

As for SSI, the above calculations are based on common standards in venture capitalism, but in reality, Sutskever’s share in the company could be worth much less or much more.

Nevertheless, even by conservative estimates, Sutskever could be on track to become a billionaire on paper if SSI closes its latest funding round, as reported.

One crucial caveat is that these estimates are based on SSI’s paper value. But without any product or revenues to speak of, any exit is likely to be years away.

From Theranos to Quibi, plenty of startups racked up multi-billion dollar valuations in early funding rounds, only to crash out when they failed to deliver. In the end, Sutskever’s wealth rests on whether SSI can live up to the hype.