Open AI Doesn’t Want Your Money Yet

On the assumption that you, dear readers, are not so chronically online as this publication, let us explain about the OpenAI IPO.

OpenAI, a company best known for connecting a chat window to a LLM before anyone else, has spent several years asking all and sundry for money. It has targeted those in control of vast lakes of money, such as Softbank (an investment firm that gave billions to WeWork based on a 30 minute conversation and “the look in the CEO’s eyes”), Microsoft (who receives money from OpenAI for Azure hosting), Nvidia (whose entire business model of selling GPUs depends on OpenAI’s survival) and Andreesen Horowitz (an investment firm run by a pair of white men which we may best describe as “soggy”).

Today in the year of our Lord 2026, OpenAI has a problem: it is now running out of people to ask for money, and the venture capital market in general is running out of money to give. The next or possibly only option is to ask you, the public at large, to give it money through an Initial Public Offering.

IPOs are a strange beast that ostensibly are used to assist a company in funding its expansion, developing new lines of business, that kind of thing. An IPO offers a piece of the company to the public, with the promise that said public will share in the success of the company that is using its money to generate profits; profits which will be distributed back to them as dividends, or as a higher share price. It does this with quite the mountain of paperwork, in the form of an S-1 filing which lays out the financial situation, plans for the future, current prospects, and how well it has historically done business.

Now, OpenAI has in fact submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC in order to go public. The contents are unknown at this time, but we may guess at some of it based on the leaked 2025 financials (assuming of course that OpenAI is prepared to be entirely transparent, and not insert data that causes our analyst soul to flinch à la SpaceX). The financial picture portrayed is concerning, to say the least; OpenAI is unquestionably losing billions of dollars, despite their best efforts at both increasing their revenue and presenting the most positive scenario.

And this now leads us to the current situation: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (a man who decided that using orbs to scan people’s eyeballs in exchange for cryptocurrency was, in fact, a worthy business venture and not an entirely ridiculous proposition that would get laughed out of the average pulp sci-fi novel) has decided that the IPO may need to be delayed due to his company not receiving as high a valuation as he would like. The valuation is still complete nonsense, in a range between USD$730 billion and USD$852 billion according to the financial soothsayers who read the provided entrails, but Altman wants USD$1 trillion and not a penny less. To this end, the IPO will be somewhat nebulously delayed from the fourth quarter of this year to some undetermined point in the next year.

We are assured, dear readers, that this decision had nothing whatsoever to do with SpaceX’s recent IPO, which raised a record USD$75 billion dollars and reached a USD$1.77 trillion valuation. Nor has it anything to do with Google’s recent plan to raise USD$80 billion through equity offerings, meaning it will offer more of its stock for sale. But we must consider that there is a limit to the sheer amount of money available worldwide for investment, and these two companies alone equate to USD$155 billion raised from the markets. In 2025, the total amount raised from IPOs was only USD$70 billion from 374 companies. (At the height of the IPO craze of 2021, USD$302 billion was raised for 1,078 companies, but we posit that this is an outlier as interest rates at that time were so low as to be almost underground, and thus the cost of borrowing money was similarly flat.)

We perhaps should not speculate on why OpenAI desires a valuation higher than USD$1 trillion, but if we may indulge for a moment:

• OpenAI is currently valued privately at USD$840 billion. While the entire AI field is in the throes of a quite bloated and over-valued bubble, it could be risky for the company to go public at less than its current valuation. Such a move could signal a loss of confidence and snowball into something far more serious, due to the market being entirely irrational and largely driven by pixie dust, emails, and the occasional cocaine bender.
• Sam Altman is simply greedy. A higher valuation means more money for him, pure and simple. That he already is a billionaire and in possession of more money than he and his entire extended family could spend in several lifetimes is presumably immaterial.
• SpaceX completed its IPO and landed at a valuation above USD$1 trillion. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have a history of animosity stemming from the time of OpenAI’s founding. (Frankly, we believe that Altman and Musk both suffer from Main Character Syndrome and would never be able to get along to any great degree, so we are unsurprised.) It would be quite predictable, even certain, that ego alone would drive Altman to make sure his company’s valuation reaches something close to Musk’s.

Alas, we may never know.

So now we must play the waiting game, and the enjoyment one may take from such an activity must surely depend on whether one intends to throw money into the endless maw of AI. This publication is watching with interest and perhaps a bucket of popcorn; the average AI maximalist may despair instead and seek other maws in which to deposit their cash. There is also the looming specter of a burst bubble to contend with, and whether OpenAI and indeed Anthropic can survive long enough to reach their IPOs. (Such is the nature of bubbles. You can never quite tell exactly when they will go splat.)

Let us revisit this topic in 2027, then, and perhaps more information will be forthcoming.