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.

Like financial reporting and "transparency" that's required for public companies.

Capital is going to dry up. All the AI companies are racing to get to market before the dumb money disappears

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.)

See: https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/how-openai-board-is-structu... for the OpenAI Structure.

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.

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.

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.)

Novo Nordisk

The corporation selling shares is just primarily owned by the non profit

The corporation selling shares is subject to normal corporate tax regime

The real answer to your question is that non profits can own shares, and there is no legal difference between passive investment of other publicly traded companies and highly consolidated shares of a private company. In the US it is seen as merely happenstance that we have such a liquid market where the shares themselves can rapidly change in value and create profits, but there is nothing controversial about that.

There is no point, it’s just government sanctioned virtue signaling

A very unserious tone from probably the most consequential company of our lifetimes. It's vibing all the way to the top I guess.

yep, same here.

The numbers are public now, this is obviously false

Or just… Americans:

https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-blindsided-ai-compani...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea of turning over shares in his company to Trump in early 2025 and discussed the matter again with senior officials in recent weeks

Pretty much is, at this point. Spcx is oversubscribed.

You’re always someone’s exit liquidity.

Elon wanted precisely the same model.

that's not the issue, Elon is just a petulant child that is losing the ai game ever since he left OAI. Elon wanted full control, and that dispute over control is the central issue.

Elon is 100% a for profit person, it's just a 10 year rivalry between Sam and Elon.

From what I understand, SpaceX has been engineered such that all kinds of passive investment funds (pension funds, ETFs) will buy into it at their first rebalancing, and as such it should get a decent amount of volume after open.

Having said that, it’s the company I have least faith in due to the recent acquisition of xAI / Twitter.

So...all cash?

I think it is intended to sound like Sam Altman. Would look exactly like a tweet of his if it didn't have capitalized characters.

> When/how are IPO dates released?

Once the SEC declares a registration statement "effective," the company is subject to the Exchange Act's reporting requirements. Theoretically one can do this and not list one's shares. That's dumb, so nobody does it.

In practice, we'll get a couple weeks to possibly days ahead of the listing. That process is partly governed by the SEC accepting the company's S-1. It's mostly down to negotiations between the company, its underwriters and IPO investors.

This is the real reason. I don't think equity market has enough capital to support three companies of this size.

Altman Gets his IPO

Well if you reverse OpenAI ... the first letter is I and the last two are P O...

Artificially Generated Internal-rate-of-Return

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.

Narcissist marketing, Sam loves it.

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?

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.

Why do you say this? It's OK to make such a bold statement, but you gotta share how you came to this conclusion. This helps with a good discussion.

> 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.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1

[2] https://www.sec.gov/about/divisions-offices/division-corpora...

Note the word "Draft".

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.

Anthropic did exactly the same thing on June 1st: https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec

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.

Also according to the Financial Times that this confidential filling gives employees who are considering to sell shares transparency.

I’m pretty sure they’re smart enough to remember to put “make no mistakes” in their prompt.

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.)

This makes no sense: the whole point is to raise capital. The valuation is never just the current value of the assets; it’s based on the expected future cash flows. A good example is in biotech, some researcher developed a treatment and wants to develop a product. They have valuable IP but zero money. So they IPO to raise capital to bring the treatment to market. The investors expect that in the future, they will get dividends or a buyout.

If a company that wanted to IPO had 1 trillion dollars, their market cap would have to be larger than their cash holding. Their cash on hand is considered or at least should be considered in any normal valuation of the company. Because shares are ownership of the company.

So a simple valuation would be something like Current Cash + Assets + Expected Future cash - (Expenses + Risk)

In theory the purpose of an IPO is to raise cash to expand a company. If the company already has the cash they don't need to do an IPO.

Where would a company ever get their market cap in cash? If they had that, wouldn’t they by definition have a higher market cap, since the value of the company is cash + the rest of the company?

Companies always trade at a premium to book, so how would that work?

the marketcap represents the cashflow estimated by the market to be taken out of the business over the lifetime of the company discounted today.

your suggestion makes no sense

...what?