I joined Binance in the summer of 2018. Base pay was somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 RMB a month, call it fifteen hundred US dollars on a good one. This is the point in the story where, if you have read enough of these, you brace for the turn: and then the token went up, and everything changed.

It did not. I am being exact about this on purpose, because the whole thing collapses if I round it the way these stories usually get rounded.

Do the math with me. It has never once come out kinder. Say I had put half of every paycheck into BNB, every month, starting in 2018. Say I had the stomach to hold through every drawdown without selling, including the ones that took most of it back, all the way to the 2021 top. The ceiling on that, the best case for someone in my seat playing the game perfectly, was roughly one to two million dollars. That is not nothing. In most of the world it is the whole arc of a life. I want that number sitting in your head, because it was a ceiling, and it cost near-perfect play to reach.

Now hold it next to a floor. In October 2025 OpenAI ran an internal tender. Six and a half billion dollars, more than 600 current and former employees, average payout around eleven million each. More than 75 of them sold the maximum the company allowed, and the maximum was thirty million dollars a person, a cap OpenAI had tripled from ten million after outside investors asked for more room to buy in. No drawdowns to stomach. No top to time. You did the work, the equity accrued, and a company-run market showed up to turn it into cash. Their floor was a number I could only reach in a spreadsheet with hindsight and a cast-iron gut.

Crypto, played perfectly: a $1–2M ceiling you had to time flawlessly — hold through every drawdown to the 2021 top. OpenAI's October 2025 tender: $11M on average, no market call required. Even their average towers over our best case.

Their floor was our ceiling.

This month a thread went viral describing the world that floor created. Deedy (@deedydas) wrote it, and it is worth reading. The vibes in San Francisco, he said, feel frenetic. A group of maybe ten thousand people have hit retirement-grade wealth in a few years, and everyone outside that group feels the door closing. He sorted the rest into the recognizable groups. The engineers who think their life's skill just stopped mattering. The middle managers watching their layer get hollowed out with no network and no AI on the resume. And the people who already made it, one of whom told him he would not sell his company because if he sold it he would only have the money. I read it the way you read something that is accurate about you. He is not wrong, and I am not going to pretend the anxiety he is describing skips me. It does not. But I have been sitting one industry over, and from the crypto seat the same picture reads worse, and not for the reason the thread thinks.

The thread treats the gap as a thing that happened to people. Timing, luck, being in the room. I spent the last couple of years running technical due diligence on deals, reading other people's cap tables for a living, and that work ruins you for the luck story. You stop seeing fortune and start seeing structure. The gap between my ceiling and their floor is not one variable. It is four, stacked, and each one multiplies the next.

Start with who owns the thing. CZ held something like ninety percent of Binance. Sam Altman, famously, held no equity in @OpenAI for years. That sounds like a point about greed. It is not. It is a point about distribution. When the founder keeps almost everything, the upside that reaches the 2018 hire in Asia is a rounding error by construction. When the founder holds little, the equity pool that everyone else divides is enormous, and an early-but-not-founding employee can end up holding a stake that prints. Same success, opposite distribution, decided years before anyone knew who won.

Not one variable — four, stacked, and each one multiplied the next. The gap between my ceiling and their floor was decided above my pay grade and before my start date.

Then the instrument they paid you in. We were paid, effectively, in a token. A token has no vesting cliff protecting you from yourself and no floor under you on the way down. To win with it you had to make a market call, in size, and then a second call to actually get out, and most people got neither right. They were paid in equity with structured vesting. Equity does not ask you to be a trader. It just sits there and compounds while you do your job, and the worst case is usually still a number.

Then the wage it all sat on top of. My base was a Shanghai base. Theirs was a San Francisco base, five to ten times higher before a single share is counted. That gap is not just lifestyle. The high base is what lets you hold the equity instead of selling it to live, which means the structural advantage compounds the behavioral one. The people best positioned to wait were the ones who least needed to.

And then how you got liquid. We had do-it-yourself liquidity. You against the order book, trying to time an exit in an asset that could fall eighty percent while you hesitated. They had a company-run tender. OpenAI did not make its people find a buyer. It organized the buyer, set the price, set the cap, and wired the money. The single hardest part of the whole thing, turning paper into cash without destroying the price, was handled for them as a benefit.

Founder concentration, the pay instrument, the wage anchor, the liquidity mechanism. Multiply them and you land somewhere most people find counterintuitive, and it is the part I cannot stop turning over. Crypto, the industry whose entire pitch was decentralization, concentrated wealth harder than almost anything before it. It minted a short list of billionaires, CZ, Brian Armstrong, SBF at the paper peak, and very few millionaires under them. AI, the centralized industry run by a handful of labs, is the one that actually distributed. Six hundred people, eleven million on average, in one afternoon. The thing that did the distributing was not an ideology. It was a structured internal market, the most boring possible piece of financial plumbing, and it moved more wealth to more ordinary employees than a decade of decentralization rhetoric ever did. We were told the trustless system would democratize the upside. The system that actually democratized it had a cap table, a tender administrator, and a thirty-million-dollar limit it had to raise because demand was too high.

Crypto's entire pitch was decentralization, and it concentrated wealth harder than almost anything before it. AI, run by a handful of labs, is the industry that actually distributed it — through the most boring possible piece of financial plumbing: a structured internal market.

I do not have the clean ending here. The honest version of this essay does not resolve, because I have not resolved it. Greg Brockman (@gdb) testified in court this month that his OpenAI stake is worth close to thirty billion dollars, and when the lawyer asked if he just happened to be thirty billion dollars richer, he said compensation was secondary to the mission. I believe him, and it does not help. The math still runs in my head some nights, the half-paycheck-into-BNB math, the perfect-play ceiling that was their floor.

What changed is not the anxiety. It is what the anxiety means. For years it felt like a verdict, like the number was a score and mine said I had chosen wrong, worked at the wrong desk, been the wrong kind of smart. Reading enough cap tables beats that out of you. You see that the gap was set by four structural variables that were decided above your pay grade and before your start date, and that no amount of being early or working harder at my seat in 2018 was going to bend them. That does not make you richer. It does not even make you calmer, exactly. It just stops the number from being about you.

The frenetic energy Deedy is describing is ten thousand people reading a structural outcome as a personal one. I have read the structure. I am still anxious. I am just no longer confused about whose verdict it is, because it was never a verdict. It was a cap table, drawn before any of us sat down.

References

• OpenAI 2025-10 employee tender — $6.6B · 600+ people · ~$11M average · 75+ hit the $30M cap — finance.yahoo.com
• Greg Brockman's ~$30B stake + "mission first" testimony (Musk v. OpenAI, 2026-05-04) — nbcnews.com
• CZ held ~90% of Binance equity — dlnews.com
• Sam Altman held no OpenAI equity for years — cnbc.com
• Deedy's original thread — x.com/deedydas