The letter reads like a founder’s article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story.
The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, MiniMax moved to raise as much as $2bn from investors. Its shares have lost about 80% of their value since March.
Yan Junjie, who is chief executive, chairman and chief technology officer, sent the pledge in an internal memo on Friday. The South China Morning Post saw the note, which a company executive then posted in full on X.
“Effective today, and until the day we achieve AGI, I will no longer accept any salary from the company,” Yan wrote. He signs off internally as “IO”.
He promised more than a pay cut. Over four years, Yan said he will hand out shares worth 4% of the company from his own holdings to reward staff. Another 1% will seed a fund for open-source projects. “We will keep going until we get there,” the letter ends.
The gesture and the ledger
The pledge is stirring, and largely symbolic. A founder’s wealth sits in equity, not in a monthly wage. Giving up the salary costs Yan little. Giving away 5% of his stake is the real commitment, and it doubles as a retention tool at a moment when Chinese AI talent is being poached hard.
The timing is the tell. The memo landed alongside a large, discounted fundraise, the kind a company runs when it needs cash and needs to steady nerves. The optimism is aimed inward, at staff watching the share price fall.
What the raise actually looks like
The numbers are less romantic. MiniMax is selling 35.6 million new shares at HK$268 each, about $1.2bn, at a near-10% discount to Thursday’s close, Bloomberg reports. It is pairing that with $6.5bn Hong Kong dollars of zero-coupon convertible bonds due 2027. Morgan Stanley and UBS are arranging the deal.
The stock fell almost 10% on Friday. The new shares dilute a float that just grew, after a six-month lock-up on early backers expired. For retail holders who bought near the top, the raise stings.
Why the stock cratered
MiniMax listed in Hong Kong in January and is chasing a second listing in Shanghai. Then the models stopped landing. Its flagship M3, out in early June, struggled to win developers. The company halved the price of its most advanced model a week after launch, a move that read as weakness, not strategy.
Rivals filled the gap. Zhipu’s GLM-5.2, DeepSeek’s V4 and Moonshot AI’s models have pulled the attention MiniMax lost. The result is a company still building ambitious open models while its pricing power slips away, in a market already gripped by a brutal price war.
Why it matters
MiniMax is not raising in a vacuum. Chinese tech firms are flooding the market for AI cash. Zhipu pulled in $4bn this week, one of the largest Hong Kong share sales of the year. Investors still want exposure to Chinese AI, even as they punish the laggards. Not everyone is bearish.
Goldman Sachs turned more positive on Friday, calling the valuation attractive and the model cost-efficient. So the real test is not the salary or the slogan. It is whether $2bn buys MiniMax enough time to ship a model that developers actually choose, before the next Chinese rival laps it again.
The letter promises to keep going until AGI. The market is asking a shorter question: what have you shipped lately?
