The Billion-Dollar Employee

This is a selected cohort of 50 leading private technology and AI companies, not an exhaustive global top-50 ranking. Research was checked on October 22, 2026. Public companies and completed acquisitions such as SpaceX, xAI, and Cursor are excluded. Privately priced operating companies with a public parent, such as Waymo, can be included.

Company or investor announcements and reported transactions take precedence over modeled secondary prices. Database-reported figures are identified separately where direct transaction evidence or its date was not established. Pre-money-only valuations and unconfirmed financing targets are excluded from calculated charts. A stale disclosed transaction is not necessarily today’s market value.

Employee counts use company disclosures or reported totals where available. Remaining usable counts are third-party workforce estimates, principally TrueUp profiles attributed to Live Data Technologies. Estimated profile counts can miss employees or include affiliations. A source retrieval date is not a measurement date. No growth is extrapolated to fill date gaps. Missing or materially conflicting observations remain unranked.

Valuation per employee in USD millions equals valuation in USD billions × 1,000 ÷ employees. Minimum employee disclosures produce upper-bound ratios. Revenue and valuation multiples are not substituted for missing headcounts. The formula above is an identity using consistently defined revenue, not a separate revenue dataset.

The downloadable data retains observation dates, sources, and exceptions. Select any company to inspect both inputs. Dates marked “month known” have month precision in the download. Results can change materially with a different headcount, valuation basis, or transaction date.