London hosts the payroll, not the capital

Posted on: 16 October 2026

OpenAI UK's accounts for 2025, filed at Companies House earlier this month, show that its 110 London staff cost £258 million. Of that, £87 million was salaries and £168 million was shares, which works out at an average of £2.3 million a head.

The reactions split along predictable lines. Some see a new class of millionaires colonising the city, while others see a recipe for raising wages everywhere else, and in Milan, less than an hour from my home in Ticino, the second reading is doing the rounds in the debate on rents. Both are looking at the headline figure, whereas the interesting part sits in a single line of the notes to the accounts.

OpenAI UK runs on a cost-plus arrangement, which means the American parent reimburses all of the subsidiary's costs and adds a margin on top. The £293 million of turnover is therefore, in substance, the wage bill invoiced back to San Francisco with a mark-up. London keeps a profit of around twenty million, while the intellectual property and the capital gains live somewhere else.

So what does the city get? A real and substantial tax take on employment, which it would be short-sighted to sneer at. It also gets the pressure on prices, since prime rents in King's Cross have risen by 18% in three years.

Dublin has been running this experiment for twenty years. It took in the European headquarters of the American giants, collected some of the highest salaries in Europe and now lives with one of the worst housing crises on the continent. The mechanism is simple. If the supply of homes does not move, very high pay concentrated on a few people does not bring incomes into line with the cost of living, it raises the cost of living for everyone else. The nurse who works next door to the offices is not paid more. She pays more.

In Milan people have started saying that what the city needs is high value-added companies. That is true, but it is only half the sentence. A subsidiary that pays well without keeping any capital produces the Dublin version, whereas a company that is founded locally and reinvests its exits locally produces something quite different. Bending Spoons, the app company that has bought Evernote and Vimeo from its base in Milan, is Milanese in its capital as well as in its payroll.

If I were running a city I would avoid one thing above all, which is celebrating the opening of an office as though it were an industrial strategy while leaving untouched the rules that stop anyone building homes. The salaries would arrive anyway, but so would the bill, and it would land on the people who do not get those salaries.