From soaring home prices to philanthropy and unexpected industries, the AI wealth wave is already transforming the city
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San Francisco has lived through gold rushes before. This one is could be the biggest yet.
SpaceX went public earlier this month, minting roughly 4,400 new millionaires. Many of them work near the company's Hawthorne, California headquarters, not in San Francisco. But OpenAI and Anthropic, both headquartered in the city, are expected to follow later this year or early next.
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If they do, that new millionaire count rises to roughly 12,000, about 800 of whom will hold more than $100 million in assets, according to an analysis from Hill.com, a platform that tracks private market transactions.
That kind of wealth concentration in a single city over a matter of months, does not disappear quietly into savings accounts or a few flashy cars. It moves through housing markets, courtrooms, tax filings, and industries you might not expect.
Here is what is already changing, and what is about to, in the City by the Bay and beyond.
San Francisco real estate has already gone feral. Median home prices are up nearly 15% year over year for the three months ending in May, the fastest growth in the country, according to Redfin.
Homes are selling for a million dollars or more over asking price, if not double. At the very top of the market, there is not enough mansions to go around, with far more buyers shopping for eight-figure homes than properties available to buy. A growing share of deals are happening off-market entirely, before listings ever go public.
And even with the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs not yet on the calendar, at least one seller reportedly said he would accept shares of either as payment.
After Google $GOOGL went public in 2004, divorce lawyers reported a surge in filings. Same for after Cisco $CSCO in 1990. Sudden wealth, research has found, gives unhappy couples the financial footing to act on what they have been postponing. One Palo Alto divorce attorney who tracked both of those waves told the Financial Times ahead of the Facebook $META IPO that he expected the same pattern to follow (though it does not appear anyone ever followed up to find out if he was right).
The same windfall that ends marriages can also start them. California's community property laws make IPO timing consequential for both. Assets acquired between marriage and separation are typically split down the middle, which means the moment a company goes public can determine how much wealth is actually on the table.
Lawyers who specialize in this territory say delaying a filing until after a major liquidity event is a common strategic move for both sides. The logic works in reverse, too. Mark Zuckerberg, apparently mindful of California's community property laws, married Priscilla Chan the day after the Facebook IPO.
A handful of women now market themselves as companions for Silicon Valley's most tech-obsessed clients, charging between $3,500 and $6,000 an hour, multiples of what the high end of traditional escort platforms charge. Some are booked out for months and considering raising their rates again.
The same industry racing to build AI companionship is, paradoxically, starving its own workers of the real thing, one escort told Forbes. They post about GPUs, AI safety, and the latest in longevity research on social media between bookings. At least one runs a booking portal built like a text-based role-playing game. Their clients, many of whom work directly in AI, are often less interested in sex than in time with someone who takes their obsessions seriously and can talk to them about it.
After making a fortune, many want to cement their legacy through charitable giving. Anthropic's seven founders stand to make billions and have pledged to donate at least 80% of their wealth. The nonprofit that holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI is expected to have assets valued at around $180 billion after the IPO, more than twice the size of the Gates Foundation's endowment, and has said it plans to distribute at least $1 billion over the next year. Tens of billions more could come from the thousands of employees who find themselves flushed and wanting to give back.
But where it goes is an open and contested question. Much will likely flow toward AI safety research and effective altruism-aligned causes, given the ideological makeup of the founders doing the giving. That has already generated skepticism.
As the New York Times pointed out, the OpenAI Foundation lists as one of its two causes managing the future and safety of AI, the same technology from which its wealth derives. Whether that counts as generosity or as another way to boost the same power that created the wealth in the first place depends on who you ask.
