Quitting tomorrow: Why your top talent is leaving

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge," Hosea 4:6.

When you look at your organisation, do you see tomorrow? In June 2026, SpaceX went public in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in history.

Roughly 4,400 employees became millionaires that day, and most of them were not engineers. They were welders, machinists, technicians. Juan Hernandez joined as a welder in 2015, earning $28 (Sh3,540) an hour. He stayed a decade. His shares are now worth just over a million dollars.

Now place beside him a different employee, at a different company, in the same industry.

Mira Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and became its Chief Technology Officer (CTO), one of the most powerful and well-compensated roles in artificial intelligence (AI).

In September 2024, after six and a half years, she resigned, saying only that she wanted "the time and space" to explore what came next. She did not name a successor.

Two other senior leaders resigned alongside her the same week. A co-founder and the chief scientist had already left months earlier, after leading the boardroom revolt that briefly removed Sam Altman as CEO.

By late 2024, of the four executives in OpenAI's own iconic leadership photo, only Altman remained.

Same industry and same moment in AI history.

One company kept a welder for ten years with equity and clarity. The other could not keep its own CTO for one more year, at a salary far beyond anything SpaceX pays its factory floor.

This week's signal

Money is never the variable. Visibility is. Here is the test every leader should run on their own organisation. Hernandez earned $28 an hour and stayed a decade.

Murati earned what is likely eight figures and left within a year - with the company's direction becoming unclear. If compensation explained retention, these two cases would be reversed.

What actually separated them was whether each could see where the organisation was going and where they stood inside that future.

SpaceX gave Hernandez ten years of visible equity, vesting paycheck by paycheck, proof of a future that included him concretely. OpenAI, in the same window, disbanded its long-term safety team, converted from nonprofit to for-profit structure, and endured a governance crisis so public that its own departing scientist warned the company's direction had grown unclear even to those inside it.

Hosea's warning was not really about a shortage of facts. It was about people with no picture of where they were headed, left to guess at their own future until guessing became leaving. The most talented person in your organisation is not calculating your salary against a competitor's. They are calculating your clarity against their own uncertainty, and uncertainty is losing more often than money ever does.

What it means for business

I have sat in enough Kenyan exit interviews to know that the real reason behind most resignations rarely matches what's written on the form.

Salary is what a company negotiates once it has already lost the argument about the future. SpaceX proved that argument can be won with equity.

OpenAI proved that even without a governance crisis of your own, the absence of a legible future will eventually cost you your best people, no matter what you pay them.

The businesses I watch that retain their strongest talent are not the highest payers. They are the ones where a manager can describe an employee's next three years with more precision than a competitor's offer letter.

What it means for policy

Kenya loses capable young professionals every year, not primarily to higher salaries abroad, but to a future they can picture more clearly elsewhere. No policy document has ever retained a graduate.

Only an economy where the next ten years are legible does — the way a decade of visible equity retained a welder, and the way its absence emptied an executive suite that could afford almost anything except clarity.

What it means for people

Hernandez was not gambling on a company. He was reading a future specific enough to bet ten years on. Murati was reading the opposite. That is the offer every leader owes the people who report to them: not certainty, which no one can give, but a future clear enough to be worth staying inside.

Afterthought

People rarely leave because of what an organisation is doing wrong today. They leave because no one has shown them what tomorrow looks like and left them to guess; even the most loyal eventually stop guessing and start looking elsewhere.

 In the bible, Hosea named that failure 3,000 years before anyone called it a retention crisis. Before it was made a corporate metric. Leaders do not keep people by paying them more. They keep people by making the future visible enough to stay for.

 -The writer is a human-centred strategist and leadership columnist