MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie Pledges to Skip Salary Until AGI, Give 4% Equity to Staff

MiniMax founder and CEO Yan Junjie has told employees he will stop taking a salary until the Chinese AI company achieves artificial general intelligence. In an internal memo shared publicly on X by a MiniMax executive, Yan also pledged to transfer part of his personal shareholding to reward employees and support open-source AI development.

‘From today until the day we achieve AGI, I will no longer draw a salary from the company,’ Yan wrote in the memo, translated from Chinese. ‘Over the next four years, I will allocate shares equivalent to 4% of the company’s total equity — held in my personal name — to incentivize team members who have fought alongside the company and created value together over the long term.’ He added that he would set aside a further 1% of his shares to fund open-source AI communities, calling it ‘the long-term commitment I make as the founder.’

According to the company, the 4% equity allocation will be distributed to employees over the next four years, while the additional 1% will establish a dedicated fund supporting the broader open-source AI ecosystem.

The announcement came alongside plans to raise approximately HK$16.04 billion (about $2.05 billion) through a Hong Kong share placement and zero-coupon convertible bonds, funding AI infrastructure, research, commercialisation and general operations. The placement covers 35.6 million new Class A shares priced at HK$268 each, expected to raise about HK$9.54 billion, alongside HK$6.5 billion in convertible bonds maturing in 2027 with a conversion price of HK$335 per share.

MiniMax went public in Hong Kong in January, raising about HK$4.8 billion at a valuation of roughly $6.5 billion. The company faces growing competition from Chinese AI developers including DeepSeek, Zhipu and Moonshot AI, and launched its latest flagship model, MiniMax M3, in June, featuring a one-million-token context window and multimodal capabilities. MiniMax reported $79 million in revenue for 2025, up 159% year-over-year, with more than 70% generated outside China, alongside a net loss of $1.87 billion tied largely to fair-value changes in financial instruments following its IPO.