The paperwork is practically written.
According to a Wednesday report by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is preparing to file for its initial public offering any day now. Weeks? Days? It’s unclear. What is clear is that the company, steered by CEO Sam Altman, has bankers at the ready.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are on deck. They’re drafting the IPO documents. Filing could happen as soon as this Friday.
A path was cleared on Monday when a jury tossed out Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Altman. Suddenly, the road to Wall Street felt a little less muddy.
“OpenAI is one of the rare privately held firms where hundreds of millions use the product daily.”
Minmo Gahng, an assistant finance professor at Cornell, puts it simply: household name recognition buys you leverage. It generates retail demand that raw fundamentals might not explain. Investors will likely bid up the valuation based on the brand power of ChatGPT alone.
But here’s the rub.
Does OpenAI make enough money?
The question hangs in the air. The company burns through capital like wood through a bonfire. Compute power isn’t just a line item. It is a physical beast requiring servers, chips, data centers. If revenue growth doesn’t outrun these astronomical expenses, public investors could panic fast.
One bad quarter could crash the stock.
Public life means showing your cards. The Securities and Exchange Commission gets to look closer. Copyright disputes, data privacy leaks, hidden liabilities—any of it could surface during this scrutiny.
OpenAI isn’t running this race alone. SpaceX is preparing a move. Anthropic is there too. It’s a sprint. A race to set the valuation rules for the whole AI industry while the money is still hot.
ChatGPT still dominates public imagination, outshining Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. But the chatbot is not the only player anymore. The monopoly feeling is fading, even if the usage numbers remain the highest in town.
A September debut looks possible on paper. Plans shift, though. Markets shift.
An OpenAI representative said nothing when asked for comment.
Silence speaks volumes in this game.
