Rubbish Check
Daily Mail Money · 15 October 2026
source“OpenAI’s London-based staff earn an average of £2.3m each as ChatGPT maker’s value soars”
R3/ 10
Lightly altered
Rubbish Rating — 1 = base fact, 10 = pure rubbish
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In short
Rubbish Talk rates Daily Mail Money's claim that OpenAI's London staff "earn £2.3m each" a 3/10 because the figure matches OpenAI UK's own Companies House filing exactly, with the only soft spot being that "earn" blurs a skewed mean of mostly illiquid, pre-IPO share awards into a tidy per-head number.
The Verdict
Lightly altered. The £2.3m figure is the real average from OpenAI UK's statutory accounts, not an invented or rounded-up number, and multiple outlets independently confirm the same £87.3m salary plus £167.8m share-award split across 110 staff. The one iteration of spin is treating a mean, pulled upward by senior researchers' outsized equity packages, as though it describes what each employee actually "earns" in cash.
What actually happened
OpenAI UK Ltd's 2025 accounts show its 110-strong London workforce shared £87.3million in base salaries and £167.8million in share-based compensation, as the value of OpenAI's pre-IPO shares surged ahead of a planned stock market listing. Divided across headcount, that averages out to roughly £2.3million per employee, with total staff costs reaching £258million, up sharply from £60.7million in 2024.
Key facts
- Average total pay per employee: £2.3m (£87.3m salaries + £167.8m share awards ÷ 110 staff), confirmed across independent coverage of the same Companies House filing.
- Average base salary alone: £794,000; the remaining ~£1.5m per head came from share-based compensation.
- Total UK staff costs: £258m in 2025, versus £60.7m in 2024, a more than fourfold rise.
- UK turnover: nearly trebled from £79.2m to £293m; profit rose from £5.4m to £20.3m.
- OpenAI's IPO, which would make the share awards liquid, has been pushed back to 2027.
What to watch for
- The £1.5m average equity component is a paper valuation tied to a $1.4trillion pre-IPO price tag that could shift materially before any 2027 listing converts it to cash.
- Watch whether follow-up coverage distinguishes this mean (likely skewed by senior AI researchers' packages, as other outlets have noted) from a typical or median London OpenAI salary.
- The same filing shows staff costs growing faster than headcount, worth tracking against OpenAI's reported cash-burn forecasts.
About this scoreThe R-Score is Rubbish Talk's editorial opinion on how far a headline's framing sits from what the underlying facts support. It is a judgement about presentation and emphasis, not an allegation that any outlet has acted dishonestly. Every figure we rely on is linked under Receipts so you can check it yourself.
