‘I Will No Longer Draw a Salary’: MiniMax CEO’s AGI Pledge to Employees

‘From today until the day we achieve AGI, I will no longer draw a salary from the company.’ That was the pledge MiniMax founder and CEO Yan Junjie made to employees in an internal memo, shared publicly on X by a company executive, that also promised to hand over a slice of his personal equity to staff.

Yan wrote that over the next four years he would allocate shares equivalent to 4% of MiniMax’s total equity — held in his own name — to reward employees who have built the company’s value over the long term, plus a further 1% to establish a fund supporting open-source AI communities. ‘I will devote all my time, energy, and resources to this endeavor,’ he wrote. ‘This is the long-term commitment I make as the founder.’

The memo landed alongside news that MiniMax is raising approximately HK$16.04 billion, about $2.05 billion, through a Hong Kong share placement of 35.6 million new Class A shares priced at HK$268 apiece, plus HK$6.5 billion in zero-coupon convertible bonds maturing in 2027. The company says the funds will go toward AI infrastructure, research and development, commercialisation and general operations.

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

MiniMax posted $79 million in revenue for 2025, up 159% from a year earlier, with over 70% of it coming from outside China, alongside a $1.87 billion net loss largely tied to fair-value changes in financial instruments following its IPO.