The new tech elite is here

TL;DR: In San Francisco, a rift is growing between tech people who work in AI and those who don’t. The new AI wealth—which has helped drive up housing prices and the cost of living in an already expensive city—is enough to make even a six-figure salary feel somewhat lackluster. And it could be a bellwether of how AI widens class inequality beyond SF.

What happened: They say comparison is the thief of joy, and nowhere is that truer right now than in San Francisco. The sky-high income (and valuable equity) that AI workers earn is leaving even those that make $180,000 a year feeling insecure, according to a New York Times report.

To put it into perspective, a $180,000 annual salary puts you in roughly the top 20% of US household incomes. But it’s still a sliver of what OpenAI and Anthropic are paying some of their staff. Average yearly stock-based compensation for OpenAI employees, for example, reached $1.5 million in 2025. As one engineer told the NYT: “I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an AI company.”

Keeping up with the AI Joneses: One area where the influx of AI wealth has had the biggest impact: real estate. The median home sale price in SF as of May was $1.7 million—16% higher than the same time last year and almost quadruple the national median. The city has even snatched the title of having the most expensive rent from NYC, with the average apartment rent hitting $3,827 per month. (The national average is $1,742.)

The pre-IPO tech elite: Thousands of already well-paid AI workers could see their equity soar once Anthropic and OpenAI go public. (The NYT projects that these two IPOs, combined with the recent SpaceX listing, could mint about 20 new billionaires.) That might also help explain all the AI lab talent shuffling we’ve seen in just the last few weeks, with several top AI researchers from Google leaving for its not-yet-public competitors.

Bottom line: It used to be that working in tech at all meant you were near the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. The (perhaps worryingly big) AI boom has made that less true than it used to be for non-AI tech workers—and the widening income gap within Silicon Valley doesn’t exactly bode well for the majority of American workers who’ve never even touched a six-figure salary. —WK