AI Career Growth Sparks a Trend of Prenups Among Tech Talent
The artificial intelligence boom is creating personal fortunes at a scale rarely seen in modern technology. Alongside the wealth, it is reshaping how people in the sector think about relationships, money, and the documents that bind them.
For Akash Samant, 26, a co-founder of the AI startup Coverflow, the question of a prenuptial agreement arose about a year and a half into his relationship with Valeria Barojas, 24, a social work student in Arizona. His company has raised $4.8 million in venture capital. He earns a base salary between $120,000 and $160,000 and holds a substantial equity stake. She lives off savings while completing her degree.
The couple splits expenses proportionally to income. He pays for flights when they visit and covered their Paris hotel and dinners. His dream, he says, is to make enough from an IPO or acquisition that she could choose not to work. But not without a prenup.
“Everyone’s effort is always going to look different to someone else’s,” Barojas said. “My 100 percent can be someone’s 60 percent, and vice versa.”
A Boom That Changes Attitudes
The numbers tell the story. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX—which recently merged with xAI—have taken steps toward public offerings. Those listings alone could create more than 16,000 millionaires, according to research firm Sacra. Tech companies are paying AI employees premium salaries, with some researchers negotiating packages worth $250 million.
This concentration of wealth is filtering into personal relationships. A survey of more than 1,000 people conducted last month by Blind, an anonymous professional forum, found that nearly 25 percent of respondents said higher AI-related compensation had changed how they split expenses with a partner. About 9 percent said the boom had made them think differently about prenuptial agreements or financial protections.
The Bay Area Mindset
In Silicon Valley, a prenup is often expected rather than exceptional. Lauren Lavender, chief marketing officer at HelloPrenup, a startup that helps couples create agreements, said it can be more surprising when a couple chooses not to get one.
“People in the Bay Area—because they work in an industry that could potentially be overtaken by AI—they’re fully aware of the assets that they have,” she said. “They have a lifestyle that they want to protect.”
Many tech workers using HelloPrenup have equity compensation packages worth more than their base salaries. The agreements are not about pessimism, Lavender suggests, but about clarity.
Independence and Control
For Gujri Singh, 31, who joined OpenAI’s sales team in late 2023, a prenup is nonnegotiable. Her perspective is shaped by broader observations of financial vulnerability.
“I know how hard it has been for women to be financially independent and be in situations where they’re not in control,” she said. “To me, that has always been the scariest thing.”
Singh’s stance reflects a theme running through the conversations: financial independence, once achieved, is worth protecting—not from a partner, but from uncertainty.
What the Trend Means
The rise of prenups among AI professionals is not a story about distrust. It is a story about valuation. When a significant portion of personal wealth is tied to equity in private companies, the stakes of asset division become harder to calculate and more consequential to get wrong.
For couples like Samant and Barojas, the conversation about prenups is part of a larger dialogue about fairness, contribution, and what each person brings to a partnership. His financial contribution is quantifiable. Her emotional support and future career are less so. The agreement, when they make it, will attempt to honor both.
“The AI frenzy is creating personal fortunes rarely seen in modern technology, and changing people’s attitudes about fairness and money in relationships,” as the Blind survey suggests. Whether that change leads to stronger partnerships or more complicated ones depends on how couples navigate the conversation.
For now, in San Francisco and beyond, more of them are having it.
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