A much-anticipated event in the tech world is nigh. OpenAI, which everyone has known is prepping for an IPO that should prove dramatic — and profitable for early employees like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman — may be preparing IPO paperwork in a matter of days or weeks.
That's from a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that pegs the IPO filing to sometime "very soon," and the Journal adds that "Bankers at firms including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been helping the artificial-intelligence giant on a draft IPO prospectus it plans to file confidentially with regulators soon, possibly as early as Friday."
This would be in preparation for a September IPO.
It's clear that OpenAI likely is full-steam ahead on the IPO process after winning a federal court case brought by Elon Musk — though Musk and his attorney say they plan to appeal immediately. In that suit, Musk was seeking as much as $130 billion in compensatory damage for what he claimed was anti-competitive behavior and a breach of charitable trust.
OpenAI has not made any official comment or statement on the IPO possibility.
We do know that OpenAI has been pretty busy, swooping in to sign a deal with the Pentagon when it looked like competitor Anthropic was getting black-balled, and in March they announced plans for a new robotics facility in the East Bay — perhaps to stay competitive with xAI, which is apparently taking over the Tesla plant in Fremont to manufacture Optimus humanoid robots.
Altman himself was throwing around money after the verdict, too, as TechCrunch reports, having a "mic drop moment" at a Y Combinator event. Altman reportedly offered "$2 million worth of OpenAI tokens" to every startup in Y Combinator's current class in exchange for equity in those startups.
As the Journal previously reported, earlier this month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has been pumping the breaks on the IPO plan, while Altman has been pushing for it. Friar has reportedly tried to be a voice of caution tempering Altman's bullish desire to spend $1.4 trillion on data and computing capacity. With the company currently generating $13 billion in revenue, that still does not compute.
The potential IPO comes just as competition has heated up fast from Anthropic and its workplace-focused iterations of Claude.
Per the Journal, "IPOs are always unpredictable, but even more so when the company is in a race to develop world-changing technology, where the winner changes week to week and investor sentiment shifts just as fast."
Altman is also said to be wanting to stay competitive with the likes of Google and Meta in terms of benefit packages for prospective employees.
CFO Friar already guided Square through a bumpy IPO during a difficult year for IPOs, as the Journal notes, so perhaps Altman and others had best follow her lead.
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