OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

It depends at least partially on how much they're going to float. I think SpaceX is only planning about a 4% float, so even at $1.5T they only need around $60B. Which is a drop in the bucket.

EDIT - but that's just the IPO, I wasn't even thinking about how much insiders will want to sell after the lockup ends...

I think one of them is not like the other.

I would invest in OpenAI or Anthropic or both but I doubt I'd invest in SpaceX.

I’m less interested in revenue and more interested in their operational costs

OpenAI reported ~$20 billion annualized revenue for 2025, up from $6 billion the year before.

Agree, deeply interested in their books and then whatever report cadence we end up on next year.

I understand that a lot of people want to cash out, but I'm surprised they're ready to share, especially given I don't think they've had issues bringing in funding in the private markets, but maybe I'm wrong.

Companies IPO'd at an earlier stage of development in the days before Sarbanes-Oxley. Netscape was a 16-month-old startup when it IPO'd. It had about 250 employees. It had raised a total $27M in venture capital then, and then raised a few hundred million in the IPO itself, which gave it a total valuation of $2.9B. It had $16M in revenue and no earnings.

OpenAI is 10 years old. It has about 4500 employees. It's raised about $180B in capital, and has a valuation of roughly $900B on about $25B in revenue. Anthropic is 5 years old. It also has around 3000-5000 employees. It will have raised about $120-140B in capital, at a $900B valuation, on about $30-45B in revenue.

In the 80s and 90s companies IPO'd to actually raise growth capital - the public markets provided the money they needed to invest and expand, and then public investors reaped the benefits of their success, or paid the price of their failure. In the 2010s and 2020s companies grow with private capital, which has fewer strings attached, and then they unload the shares on the public market when they reach the top of their growth curve, leaving the public holding the bag.

> Be scared when random AI companies IPO with bad ideas and no revenue.

Shouldn't we at least be a little bit scared already when shoe companies pivot to AI and their stock goes up ~750%?

Eh, at the beginning of 1995 the Nasdaq PE ratio was about 17.5. The current Nasdaq PE bounces around 33. During the dotcom bubble that would be the early 1998 timeframe.

I think we're a lot closer to the peak than when Netscape IPO'd relative to the dotcom bust for a few reasons:

* big banks are trying to get out of their data center loan commitments, even selling that debt at a discount. From the article:

> According to the Financial Times, major lenders are already scrambling to offload pieces of massive data center loans through private transactions, risk transfers and synthetic structures. The reason is simple. AI infrastructure borrowing is reaching sizes that are beginning to choke the arteries of the financial system itself.

* there are real questions about long-term liquidity and capital capacity across the entire VC ecosystem. Ed Zitron estimates that the available capital for all technology VC funds will be fully exhausted within roughly two years if current spending levels hold steady. More money has been spent on AI in the last decade than the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Space Program and the US highway system combined[1]

* short-term success of these new data centers coming online is heavily reliant on steady fuel prices since hooking up to the grid can take years and many burn diesel generators while waiting for grid access. If the war in Iran drags on, high fuel prices will continue to ratchet up the cost of data center operations.

* public sentiment around the economy was largely positive heading into the collapse, whereas we've been in fairly consistent state of economic uncertainty for years now. Affordability was not a topic of conversation back then and a majority of Americans are unhappy with the direction of the economy in 2026.

0: https://www.investing.com/analysis/the-ai-boom-is-starting-t...

1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spen...

These backward comparisons are incredibly stupid.

They are not very comparable - go list out the characteristics for it to be a viable comparison.

What even is this post? Desperate for validation? LMAO

Yup, Sam can claim that AGI is owned by everyone (he really means their pension funds though), while he makes a hasty exit to his private island retreat which we all have paid for.

Agreed. They should IPO first if they think Anthropic’s IPO will be bigger. Get as much capital as you can first, then use it to buy more compute and defensively.

The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.

Wise comment. 25 years working in PE showed me that retail investors are how you pay off losses.

Yeah, and now the you shall not buy this bullshit begins. And then the price soars. :D

Well, sad to say this is simply untrue for a few reasons.

1. "Retail" does not have enough purchasing power to have all of these "bags" unloaded on to.

2. Institutions buy shares in public firms post-IPO all the time even when they're "unloading bags onto retail". Take Uber (random example) ~83% is owned by institutions.

3. General factual history of the stock market shows that you are incorrect. Successful companies that IPO and continue to do business still have quite a lot of room left to grow. What was Google's market capitalization at IPO? What is it now? Is it possible some early investors made higher multiples than the IPO -> May 20th valuation? Yea for sure. That doesn't mean that all the value was captured. It also doesn't take into account the early stage risk for investing. Is Google an "at this point IPO"? No, but the principle is the same.

It's also worth mentioning however that the number of IPOs is going down over time. You could maybe argue that the only ones that actually IPO are all the bags, but that seems like a stretch.

These cynical comments "IPOs are mainly for unloading bags on to retail" lack explanatory power and data.

Them filing will burst the bubble.