OpenAI Files for IPO at $852 Billion (and Losing $1.22 Per Dollar)

OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO on May 22 and announced it publicly on June 8. The valuation: $852 billion. The catch: the company loses $1.22 for every dollar it earns, and internal documents project a $14 billion loss in 2026 with no path to profitability until 2029.

This episode breaks down the filing and the math behind it. Revenue is running around $2 billion a month, tripling year over year since 2023. The March funding round closed at $122 billion. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are leading the deal, and Sam Altman is targeting a September listing, which would put OpenAI at 34x to 40x revenue at a price between $852 billion and over $1 trillion.

Then there's the competitive context. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 a week before OpenAI, at a $965 billion valuation, which now sits above OpenAI's. SpaceX starts trading Friday at $1.75 trillion. Three of the largest IPOs in history are landing inside a month, and the order they go matters: if Anthropic prints a profitable quarter before OpenAI lists, the market gets a benchmark for what a "good" AI company looks like, and OpenAI has to clear it.

The filing also became possible because of one ruling. Two days before the confidential submission, a jury dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI on a statute of limitations technicality. That was the single biggest legal obstacle to going public, and it was cleared first.

We cover what the numbers mean for developers and businesses building on the API, why a public OpenAI optimizes for margins instead of developer experience, what the tender offer for employees signals about liquidity pressure, and whether public market investors will actually pay a premium on a company burning $14 billion a year.

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