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.
• SSI’s latest funding round values the company at $32 billion
• The mammoth funding round means Sutskever is likely a worth more than a billion dollars.

Safe SuperIntelligence has reportedly raised $2 billion in its latest funding round, which values the company at $32 billion, granting its co-founders a sizable windfall.

Among Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, 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.

Now, although SSI’s product and strategy plans remain under wraps, it has nonetheless managed to cement its position as 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 said, as one of 11 co-founders, Sutskever’s equity is likely to be at the higher end of the spectrum. Even a 0.1% stake could be worth hundreds of millions based on OpenAI’s latest reported valuation of $300 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 three funding rounds allocated 60% to investors.

That would mean Sutskever still owns 13% of the company.  Based on these assumptions, his stake would be worth $4.2 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 is likely a billionaire on paper after SSI’s latest funding round.

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.