These aren't annual pay packages. It's some "can't retire on that" base salary plus a promise of gradually vesting equity on a multi-year schedule. For public companies, you'll get that amount if you hang around for x years and there is no sudden decline in market price. For non-public companies (OpenAI), the equity is more pie-in-the-sky.

I'd expect a few millions of annual pay, anyone could retire on that. Whether someone wants to, it's different but having anything beyond $1M available is definitely sufficient, especially if you're sub-40.

Most sources confirmed that yearly effective pay would be 100M level, unlike the normal tech breakdown.

OpenAI doesn’t do the usual equity for employees, they famously do profit sharing.

You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.

Jeez!

A fellow sell-out. Welcome. Those are in abundance, having no honor and ethics

This is a great point, but some passions fundamentally require other people and capital.

These AI researchers fundamentally need access to tons of compute, data and engineers in order to pursue their passion.

Eh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.