Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das estimates that roughly 10,000 people — founders and employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Nvidia and Meta — have crossed $20M in personal wealth over the last five years, in a widely circulated May 16, 2026 post on X. Das described San Francisco as "pretty frenetic right now" and called the divide in financial outcomes "the worst I've ever seen." The post landed as layoffs continue across software engineering and the rest of the tech workforce watches the AI cohort pull away.
The arithmetic in Das's "back of the envelope" calculation is the part that stung. A salaried worker earning under $500,000 a year, he argued, "can work their well-paying… job for their whole life and never get there" — there being the $20M-plus retirement number cleared by the AI insider class in roughly 60 months. That gap, compressed into a single cycle, is what's driving the mood he describes.
Das pointed to two compounding pressures outside the winners' circle. Layoffs are "in full swing," and "many software engineers feel that their life's skill is no longer useful," producing what he called "a deep malaise about work (and its future)." The framing matters because it's coming from a venture investor whose firm funds the same companies producing the windfalls.
Key facts
- 01Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das estimates 10,000 AI-company employees and founders crossed $20M in personal wealth over the last 5 years.
- 02Das names OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Nvidia and Meta as the concentration points for the windfalls.
- 03Salaried workers earning under $500K a year cannot reach the same threshold in a career, per Das's framing.
- 04The post, dated May 16, 2026, describes San Francisco as 'pretty frenetic' amid active layoffs in software engineering.
- 05Entrepreneur Deva Hazarika pushed back on X, calling most of those described 'incredibly fortunate.'
The wealth concentration tracks with public valuations. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Nvidia and Meta have all repriced sharply over the last 24 months on the strength of model revenue, training-compute demand and enterprise deployment. Equity grants issued during that window — especially to early employees and to AI-research hires recruited at tender-offer-friendly companies — have converted paper compensation into liquid or near-liquid wealth at a pace the broader tech industry has not seen since the early cloud era.
“Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people — employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders — have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M.”— Jaeden Schafer
The reaction on X split predictably. Entrepreneur Deva Hazarika argued that "most of the people in this post are incredibly fortunate and can simply make a choice to be happy," pushing back on the framing that the AI cohort itself is suffering. Another user captured the more uncomfortable dynamic: "the same technology is both the lottery ticket & the thing eating your fallback." That second line is the one circulating among engineers outside the named companies.
It also lands during a stretch of structural change at the labs themselves. Greg Brockman has just taken charge of product strategy at OpenAI under a reorganization around four pillars, merging ChatGPT and Codex teams. Runway, valued at $5.3B, is positioning video generation as a path to world models. Anthropic's Claude Code organization has reported 80x growth. The capacity to mint new $20M employees is, by the named companies' own metrics, accelerating.
The skills story is the harder one to read. Das's claim that engineers feel "their life's skill is no longer useful" is not yet matched by clean public data on net engineering employment at the AI-leader cohort versus the rest of the industry. Companies announcing layoffs in 2026 have generally cited efficiency and AI-tooling productivity rather than a wholesale headcount collapse, and engineering-adjacent roles inside the AI labs remain among the best-paid in the market. The malaise is real; the mechanism is more contested.
Some of the X commentary called the wealth-gap framing self-indulgent given the absolute income levels involved. The sub-$500K earner in Das's example is, by national standards, in the top 1% of US household income. That doesn't make the relative comparison wrong — it makes the comparison specifically about proximity to the AI compensation pool, not about general affluence.
There is also a missing denominator. Das's 10,000 figure is explicitly back-of-the-envelope and aggregates founders with rank-and-file employees across five companies of very different sizes. Nvidia alone has tens of thousands of staff; OpenAI and Anthropic are an order of magnitude smaller. How concentrated the $20M+ tier actually is — and how durable, given vesting schedules and unrealized equity — is the question the post doesn't answer.
The political read on a venture partner publishing this is that the AI-funding class wants the conversation about the cycle's distribution to happen out loud rather than around it. Whether that produces different hiring, different secondary-market behavior, or different compensation design at the next tier of AI companies is the part worth watching. The labor-market story underneath — engineers questioning the value of a career skill while a small cohort exits — is the one that will shape AI hiring for the rest of this cycle, and it's already visible in how candidates are choosing between the named five and everyone else.
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