It's got nothing to do with safety, he doesn't have the numbers to go public and is trying to mask that.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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What kind of numbers do they need?
Revenue growth that suggests a path to profitability would be a start.
For the evaluation OpenAI and its investors would target, they would need pretty great ones. But another thing is that they'd also need to look good relative to anthropic, who is also looking at an IPO.
Not sure if their plan for it has changed,but OpenAI would always be measured against them. And my understanding is that anthropic is said to have better financials while having raised less investment money so far.
There is only so much liquidity for IPOs and SpaceX already vacuumed up a lot. If both openai and and anthropic would IPO as an option for investors to buy into a pure play, I assume everyone would compare the two and go for the perceived winner (or want a good discount for the second best)
Big, I think.
Hahaha, AI hype has already reached and past its peak, the best time to do an ipo for them is today, second best time would be tomorrow.
Sure it might be here to stay, but the gold rush FOMO phase is over.
He is suggesting we slow everything down until he works out how the Chinese are Chinesing.
That company is fucked.
Indeed. Next year several billion dollar loans of theirs comes due, with more and larger ones the following year and so on.
Don’t worry, it’s DEFINITELY not because they would need to disclose their finances to investors. Just keep pouring money in and everything will turn out fine!
Anyone who has gone through an IPO knows how fucking rigorous all of the audits and reporting are for investors. Guaranteed 1000% that they failed the audit, or worse they didn't even get to the audit stage, or as you said their finances they know are shit. It is zero surprise to me that they're waiting.
Where was this rigorous audit for SpaceX?
Its result was and is aggregated by some freaks here
Their own numbers are documented here:
https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx
Including all their bullshit Musk-AI spendings. I have no idea why anyone thought this to be a good investment or a good company - they did do that audit and published the results, people still flocked (...) to it
I mean I hate Musk as much as the next Musk hater, but I can understand why SpaceX IPO'd and why OpenAI would hide their audit and finances.
SpaceX literally made self-landing rockets. They're not a Tesla or a Boring Company bullshit scam. They did something that was amazing, and still is, and opened the door to much cheaper launches into orbit, meaning they can get so many government contracts for anything they need to do in space.
It is WAY cheaper to put stuff in orbit now thanks to SpaceX. That's why they also went for low earth orbit internet and did starlink. Their own tech made starlink possible. Now I'd never use starlink because fuck Musk, but this is a direct result of SpaceX doing groundbreaking work.
Literally everything Musk does rides on the popularity of SpaceX actually making a massive achievement in rocketry. Tesla fucking sucks and doesn't even make the best self driving electric vehicles. The Boring company was a failure and/or scam. Starlink is a fucked up attempt to get everyone's data... Which would be a cooler idea if it weren't related to Musk but I need to have a tiny bit of trust in my ISP, sorry.
Only SpaceX ever did something cool, and it was legitimately really cool, and the result of good engineers doing work that Musk took the credit for.
Oh SpaceX core business including their numbers are amazing, I agree! But they also disclosed the whole AI stuff, including the madness of "inference in space" - the physics is then only one search away. .. PayPal was really cool and solved problems as well - and so did Tesla!
I think Musk is like a reverse Midas, eversthing he touches becomes shit for everyone else :/
SpaceX was by far the biggest exciting development in the last years for me ... There's still hope I'll be wrong though - hoping for it!
Plus it's Musk's branding. Unfortunately people still buy into that guys brand. OpenAI doesn't really have that kind of moat. just look at Samsung and Sk Hynix. Open AI and anthropic would have similar, if not worse fate
It's a good point. He might have ruined his "brand" in some ways, but he always kept some people believing he's some sort of super genius, the kind of people that think intelligence is directly proportional to your net worth.
He does some super cringe shit trying to pretend he's a genius online and most don't fall for it, but as long as some wealthy people do, he'll continue to have his brand.
Also his stocks have made some people rich, are usually way overvalued, so even people that hate the fuck usually know not to bet against his stocks. He is pretty good at blatantly manipulating the fuck out of the market no matter what the news cycle is, and he never suffers consequences.
Hilarious.. I guess this pushes back the inevitable bubble collapse (probably until just after they do go public)
They will never go public. Their finances will be in an even poorer state next year, because that is when the first of their many billion dollar loans are coming due.
I am willing to bet the loans get differed, they are later forced to IPO and will pay debts with that whilst Altmam probably noshes off the great orange turd in hopes he can disappear somewhere with a truck load of cash.
I hope they go right under a rock and stay there.
Good news for retail investors.
And tons of retirement funds, not just in the US. Before I took manual control of mine, about 30% was US stock indexes.
Is this a concession of defeat to spaceX
Probably not in AI itself but SpaceX has starlink which I believe is actually profitable