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rfgplk 3 minutes ago [-]
Companies IPOing should be forced to put up their estimated market cap as collateral in cash. Oh what is that? You don't have $1 trillion in cash to put up? Cool, you're not a $1 trillion dollar company then.
csallen 1 minutes ago [-]
This makes no sense. Market cap and cash reserves are two different stats for a reason. Why would they need to be the same? Just to make things simpler for people who don't actually know what market cap means? (Which, granted, is the vast majority of people.)
verbify 1 minutes ago [-]
Companies always trade at a premium to book, so how would that work?
kommunicate 35 seconds ago [-]
...what?
xorgun 57 seconds ago [-]
[dead]
ai_critic 48 minutes ago [-]
> We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.
Presumably those things were harder as a charity/non-profit.
krona 25 minutes ago [-]
They need to financially engineer a good looking quarter beforehand.
Perhaps Larry Ellison can cut them a nice quid pro quo for a few months to make OpenAI look profitable (like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal), although that's probably unlikely given the debt Oracle is taking on to build it's infra.
anukin 19 minutes ago [-]
You are forgetting the google space x deal too
4 minutes ago [-]
edoceo 25 minutes ago [-]
Like financial reporting and "transparency" that's required for public companies.
fear91 24 minutes ago [-]
I don’t get what’s the point of non-profits if you can IPO them. How does that make any sense?
wmf 20 minutes ago [-]
They're IPOing a commercial subsidiary of OpenAI so that it can donate even more money to the parent nonprofit.
(Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)
Yizahi 3 minutes ago [-]
Checks and balances dear sirs and madams, checks and balances. Excepts apparently it meant cheques used to top up account balances.
1) In order to fund research - this stuff costs 10s of billions of dollars - everyone, from Ilya, to Elon, to Sam - all agreed that they would require a profit-arm to raise money. Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit.
2) The non profit is still there - and controls the commercial element.
alpinisme 8 minutes ago [-]
“Controls”
That will be especially untrue after IPO when shareholders can claim there are fiduciary responsibilities that conflict with the non profit goals.
argee 12 minutes ago [-]
> Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit
How much has MacKenzie Scott donated to non-profits again?
Seems like such a claim is on thin ice.
tedsanders 19 minutes ago [-]
The nonprofit (OpenAI Foundation) owns ~26% of the for-profit (plus extra warrants).
The for-profit (OpenAI Group PBC) is what's filing the S-1 Draft.
The OpenAI Foundation also exclusively appoints the board of the OpenAI Group PBC and can replace directors at any time.
(I work at OpenAI, but I am not a lawyer and am not speaking on behalf of OpenAI - just sharing my personal understanding.)
an0malous 20 minutes ago [-]
There is no point, it’s just government sanctioned virtue signaling
stinger 14 minutes ago [-]
This is like a slack message
lnrd 4 minutes ago [-]
What was that Warren Buffett's quote about everyone trying to leave the party seconds before midnight in a room where there are no clocks? I think it was at peak of the dot com bubble
throw03172019 10 minutes ago [-]
Was this meant as an internal team post?
ortusdux 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much of it is photos?
kylecazar 13 minutes ago [-]
What a weird tone this is written in.
cloudengineer94 22 minutes ago [-]
Here we go… Let’s see if retail investors are indeed exit liquidity or not
anukin 18 minutes ago [-]
Pretty much is, at this point. Spcx is oversubscribed.
deadbabe 9 minutes ago [-]
You’re always someone’s exit liquidity.
bpt3 37 minutes ago [-]
I'm just anticipating the next version of “Community-based EBITDA" that sama rolls out in the latest attempt to convince everyone that spending >$1 to earn $1 is a good idea.
cloudengineer94 22 minutes ago [-]
Here we go
rvz 1 hours ago [-]
This is the true definition of AGI and will be achieved this year.
The I in AGI has always stood for IPO.
hmokiguess 47 minutes ago [-]
Altman Gets his IPO
iyeyerjdsd 31 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
onlyrealcuzzo 10 minutes ago [-]
Artificially Generated Internal-rate-of-Return
root-parent 25 minutes ago [-]
Well if you reverse OpenAI ... the first letter is I and the last two are P O...
47 minutes ago [-]
guluarte 35 minutes ago [-]
"Hey, don't invest too much in Spacex or Anthropic. We're planning an IPO too."
winfredJa 31 minutes ago [-]
This is the real reason. I don't think equity market has enough capital to support three companies of this size.
vessenes 27 minutes ago [-]
SpaceX IPO is slated to be $75-80bn — the market has size for that. We also have seen robust options and finance markets for AAPL and NVDA over the last years that make the broader ecosystem not overly worrying in my armchair opinion.
I’m not clear how much crossover demand there is between SX and Anthropic/oAI — that seems like the more interesting question. I’m guessing if we had Anthropic/oAI launching at the same time we’d see some pretty interesting capital dynamics.
XCSme 1 hours ago [-]
> We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it.
What?
hmokiguess 1 hours ago [-]
Narcissist marketing, Sam loves it.
27 minutes ago [-]
SilverElfin 1 hours ago [-]
They expect someone to leak that they had submitted it, so they’re just saying it themselves. I don’t think they mean that the actual contents (like financial projections and all that) will be leaked.
shimman 41 minutes ago [-]
Growing worry I have are the dozens of newly minted corporate elites that will continue to wreck havoc on the tech industry mandating their golden paths while America still lacks medicare for all, college for all, and universal childcare.
If you think Sam Altman is bad for the industry, imagine what 200 of him will be like!
philipallstar 26 minutes ago [-]
We had universal childcare until we converted single-income families into dual-income families in order to make the boomers who they bought houses from rich.
dofm 26 minutes ago [-]
I was wondering about this the other week.
Is there a chart, somewhere, like a family tree, of what the Apple and Microsoft stock "ordinary millionaires" went on to do?
outside1234 42 minutes ago [-]
"We want to be ready to grift public money at a moment's notice, but there are still opportunities to grift private money right now, so we are holding off."
mlmonkey 53 minutes ago [-]
What's the point of a "confidential S-1"?? Isn't the S-1 supposed to inform potential investors?!? So ... shouldn't it _not_ be confidential??
JumpCrisscross 22 minutes ago [-]
> What's the point of a "confidential S-1"?
“Under the JOBS Act, it has been possible since April 2012 for ‘emerging growth companies’ to file a Form S-1 on a confidential basis, only making the contents public 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO” [1]. Since 2017 and 2025 it’s been available to basically all companies [2].
Withdrawing an IPO looks bad. Confidential filing lets issuers start and have the option to abort the process without taking reputational damage. (The specifics of OpenAI’s filing, and any back and forth with the SEC, remains confidential.)
Once it no longer is being drafted—and agreed upon by all parties to meet the needed regulatory standards—it will become final and be publicly published.
The SEC needs to review it before approving a company to go public at all. It’s targeted at investors but they need to clear it, ask questions, demand changes, etc.
uxhacker 13 minutes ago [-]
Also according to the Financial Times that this confidential filling gives employees who are considering to sell shares transparency.
koolba 50 minutes ago [-]
Would be hilarious if they used an LLM to write it and it started hallucinating revenue streams and numbers.
stanmancan 33 minutes ago [-]
I’m pretty sure they’re smart enough to remember to put “make no mistakes” in their prompt.
Presumably those things were harder as a charity/non-profit.
Perhaps Larry Ellison can cut them a nice quid pro quo for a few months to make OpenAI look profitable (like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal), although that's probably unlikely given the debt Oracle is taking on to build it's infra.
(Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)
1) In order to fund research - this stuff costs 10s of billions of dollars - everyone, from Ilya, to Elon, to Sam - all agreed that they would require a profit-arm to raise money. Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit.
2) The non profit is still there - and controls the commercial element.
That will be especially untrue after IPO when shareholders can claim there are fiduciary responsibilities that conflict with the non profit goals.
How much has MacKenzie Scott donated to non-profits again?
Seems like such a claim is on thin ice.
The for-profit (OpenAI Group PBC) is what's filing the S-1 Draft.
The OpenAI Foundation also exclusively appoints the board of the OpenAI Group PBC and can replace directors at any time.
https://openai.com/our-structure/
(I work at OpenAI, but I am not a lawyer and am not speaking on behalf of OpenAI - just sharing my personal understanding.)
The I in AGI has always stood for IPO.
I’m not clear how much crossover demand there is between SX and Anthropic/oAI — that seems like the more interesting question. I’m guessing if we had Anthropic/oAI launching at the same time we’d see some pretty interesting capital dynamics.
What?
If you think Sam Altman is bad for the industry, imagine what 200 of him will be like!
Is there a chart, somewhere, like a family tree, of what the Apple and Microsoft stock "ordinary millionaires" went on to do?
“Under the JOBS Act, it has been possible since April 2012 for ‘emerging growth companies’ to file a Form S-1 on a confidential basis, only making the contents public 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO” [1]. Since 2017 and 2025 it’s been available to basically all companies [2].
Withdrawing an IPO looks bad. Confidential filing lets issuers start and have the option to abort the process without taking reputational damage. (The specifics of OpenAI’s filing, and any back and forth with the SEC, remains confidential.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1
[2] https://www.sec.gov/about/divisions-offices/division-corpora...
Once it no longer is being drafted—and agreed upon by all parties to meet the needed regulatory standards—it will become final and be publicly published.