HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah sells chat.com URL worth over $15 million to OpenAI for ChatGPT

HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has recently revealed that he sold a domain worth more than $15 million to OpenAI. He had bought chat.com in 2023 and sold it a few months later without disclosing the buyer. He did, however, share that he sold the domain for more than he had originally paid for it, The Verge reported.

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared the URL on X. It automatically routes to ChatGPT.

Following the disclosure, Shah implied that the AI startup paid him in shares instead of cash.

"I am not disclosing the exact price yet, but it's in 8 figures and is the most expensive domain name transaction I've ever been involved with," he wrote on LinkedIn.

In his recent post on X, the HubSpot boss added that has known Altman "for over a decade since before OpenAI". He also implied that he was paid for the domain in shares instead of cash since he does not like "profiting off of people he considers friends" and because he "always wanted to own OpenAI shares."