MiniMax CEO Gives Up Pay, Hands 4% Equity to Staff in AGI Push

MiniMax founder and CEO Yan Junjie has told his roughly 400-plus employees that he will stop taking a salary until the Chinese AI company reaches artificial general intelligence, while committing to transfer 4% of his personal equity to staff over the next four years.

The pledge came in an internal memo, later shared publicly on X by a MiniMax executive. ‘Markets fluctuate and external noise abounds, yet our forward trajectory remains unchanged,’ Yan wrote, adding that from that day forward he would ‘no longer draw a salary from the company’ until AGI is achieved. He also set aside an additional 1% of his shares to fund open-source AI development, calling it his ‘long-term commitment’ as founder.

MiniMax paired the announcement with plans to raise about HK$16.04 billion, roughly $2.05 billion, through a Hong Kong share placement and zero-coupon convertible bonds. The placement involves 35.6 million new Class A shares priced at HK$268 each, expected to bring in about HK$9.54 billion, alongside HK$6.5 billion in bonds maturing in 2027 at a HK$335 conversion price. The company says the money will fund AI infrastructure, R&D, commercialisation and general operations.

MiniMax listed in Hong Kong in January, raising about HK$4.8 billion at a roughly $6.5 billion valuation, and competes with Chinese AI developers DeepSeek, Zhipu and Moonshot AI. Its latest model, MiniMax M3, launched in June with a one-million-token context window, multimodal capabilities and the company’s MiniMax Sparse Attention architecture built to reduce long-context inference costs.

The company reported $79 million in 2025 revenue, up 159% year-over-year, with over 70% coming from outside China, alongside a $1.87 billion net loss tied largely to fair-value changes in financial instruments after its IPO.