저자: James · 외국인
요약 보기
OpenAI IPO 추진을 둘러싼 CEO Altman과 CFO Friar 간 갈등을 다룬다. Friar는 대규모 데이터센터 약정(약 7000억 달러 규모)과 내부통제 미비를 이유로 올해 IPO에 회의적이라는 보도가 있다. 1,220억 달러 투자 유치는 Amazon 350억 달러(IPO 조건부), SoftBank 300억 달러(3회 분할), Nvidia 300억 달러(미공시) 등 조건부 요소가 많다. ChatGPT 주간 사용자 10억 목표 미달, 2025년 매출 목표 미달 보도가 있다. 발표자는 OpenAI의 재무 취약성을 강조하고, 결국 IPO는 필요에 의해 진행될 것으로 본다. 이 영상은 상장 자산에 대한 직접 투자 종목 언급이 없다.
다듬은 글
All right, hello, and welcome back to the Broken Business Models channel. I'm your host, James, and in today's video, we are going to be continuing our coverage of the ongoing dumpster fire known as OpenAI. Now, OpenAI is planning to conduct an IPO by the end of this year. And recently, there's been some reporting that shows some problems and internal disagreements at the company.
Most notably, there appears to be a growing rift between OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, and OpenAI's CFO, Sarah Friar. So, the first reports that about the disagreements between Friar and Altman came in early April of 2026. So, in early April, The Information published a report saying that OpenAI's CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing.
Sam Altman is the more aggressive one, where he wants to conduct an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026. However, Sarah Friar does not want to do an IPO this year. She thinks the company is not ready. There are two main reasons There are two main concerns that Sarah Friar has. First of all, OpenAI has hundreds of billions of dollars of data center spending commitments to the likes of Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Coreweave, and others.
These have been, you know, covered extensively in the media. There are, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of spending commitments that OpenAI has no way to pay for. If when OpenAI goes public, they they are going to have to disclose the details of all of these spending commitments. I mean, then once investors see how much financial risk OpenAI actually has from all these massive spending commitments, this could cause investor sentiment to turn negative and OpenAI's stock price could collapse.
So, that is what Sarah Friar is worried about. The other thing she's worried about is that she thinks that OpenAI lacks sufficient internal controls to be a public company. Now, obviously when you're a public company, you have to publish audited financial statements, you have to give a bunch of disclosures to the SEC.
There's all this administrative process. And I guess OpenAI is such a mismanaged and poorly run company that Sarah Friar thinks that they won't even be able to fulfill the basic reporting and regulatory requirements associated with being a public company. So, Sam Altman really wants to do the IPO in the fourth quarter of this year.
Um so, Sarah Friar goes up to Sam Altman and tells him, "Hey, we have all these problems. I don't think we can actually do an IPO this year." Well, Sam Altman does not want to hear any criticism or any doubt. Sam Altman only wants to surround himself with yes-men. So, they OpenAI recently did some changes to their executive leadership structure, whereby Sarah Friar, the CFO, no longer reports directly to Sam Altman.
So, Sarah Friar is not allowed to even talk to Sam Altman directly. Instead, they have to go through an intermediary. There's a woman named Fidji Simo. Um and Fidji Simo is the CEO of AGI deployment OpenAI. Such a bizarre title, but there's this Fidji Simo is CEO of AGI deployment OpenAI. And she Fidji Simo reports directly to Sam Altman.
Sarah Friar reports to Fidji Simo, and then Fidji Simo reports to Sam Altman. So, again, Sarah Friar, the CFO of the company, is not even allowed to talk to Sam Altman because Sam Altman does not want to hear bad news from her. So, she has to go through this intermediary. Even more concerningly, in the information article, it is reported that Sam Altman, he goes and has meetings with, you know, venture capitalists and various investors who are considering investing money into OpenAI.
Typically, at these fundraising meetings, when you're talking to prospective investors, the CFO would be present at those meetings. But recently, Sam Altman has been excluding Sarah Fryer from these meetings. And probably because, you know, Sam Altman being the con man that he is, he goes to these meetings with these private equity or venture capital people and swindles them into convince them to invest into OpenAI.
If Sarah Fryer was there, Sam Altman probably fears that Sarah Fryer would tell these investors some of the truth about OpenAI's real financial position, and that would scare away the investors. So, it's basically a huge disaster. Now, this begs, you know, the question of why if So, Sam Altman only wants to surround himself with yes-men, and then Sarah Fryer is apparently not a yes-man.
So, she, well, a yes-woman, you know, she is actually pushing back on kind of Sam Altman's grandiose spending plans. So, why doesn't Sam Altman just fire Sarah Fryer and replace her with a new CFO that's just going to be a rubber stamp yes-man? I think the reason is, as the company is preparing for an IPO, firing the chief financial officer right before you do an IPO, that's going to look very bad optically.
So, instead of formally, you know, actually firing her, which would result in a lot of negative press, he's instead isolating her and excluding her from the investor meetings, basically not allowing her to do her job uh so that Sam Altman can continue with his reckless spending spree uh without facing any criticism internally.
Now, as far as, you know, Fiji Simo, she is the CEO of AGI deployment at OpenAI, and she reports directly to Sam Altman. Sarah Friar reports to Fiji Simo. The problem with Fiji Simo is that she has a chronic debilit- debilitating and incurable medical condition called uh um neuroimmune uh so it's called POTS, uh which stands for I'm not sure exactly what it stands for, but she has this medical condition called POTS, and it is incurable.
She's had this for years, and in early April of 2026, Fiji Simo s- uh took a medical leave, an indefinite medical leave, to focus on her medical condition. And as of the time of recording this video in early May, so it's been about a month, Fiji Simo has been on this medical leave for a month, and there's no word of her having returned or when she will ever return.
So, and remember that she is the go-between between Sarah Friar and Sam Altman, but she is not even in the office cuz she's been on medical leave for the past month. So, there's no communication between Sam Altman and Sarah Friar. So, how are you running How are you supposed to run a massive company, OpenAI, that's supposedly preparing for an IPO when the CEO can't even talk to the CFO?
It's a bizarre situation. But then, in late April, it got even worse because in late April, The Wall Street Journal published a report saying, "OpenAI misses key revenue and user targets in high-stakes sprint toward IPO." The company's CFO, that's Sarah Friar, and the board have questioned the wisdom of massive data center spending in the face of slowing growth.
So, specifically, OpenAI had an internal goal to reach 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025. They did not meet that goal. I think at the end of 2025, they announced that they had like 900 million weekly active users, or like 8 or 900 million. And as of May of 2026, they still have not announced that they have achieved 1 billion weekly active users.
Given what a highly promotional company OpenAI is, you know that the second they reach 1 billion weekly active users, they're going to put out, you know, press releases, talk to the media, and brag about it. They have not done that yet. So, it is safe to assume that they have less than 1 billion weekly active users.
So, and now they're so they have missed their target, and part of that is due to, you know, increasing competition from the likes of Claude and Gemini and others. Also, they missed their 2025 revenue target. The Wall Street Journal article, they did not disclose what the target actually was, um but we know that they generated, I think, 13.1 billion dollars of revenue in 2025, which was um so reportedly less than their internal target.
And in 2026, they have missed multiple monthly revenue targets. So, the business is not growing uh as fast as they had expected. And Sarah Friar and the board members are privately expressing concerns that given that revenue growth is slowing, they think that they will not be able to pay for their massive data center spending commitments, which according to media reports total 600 billion dollars over the next few years.
However, as we will shortly, I think that their data center spending commitments are actually significantly greater than $600 billion. So, in a few days ago, I think it was like two or three days ago. So, this is after the report and the information was published and after that report from the Wall Street Journal was published, Sarah Friar did an interview on CNBC where they asked her about these, you know, reports about the disagreements between her and Sam Altman and the fact that she is uh she is skeptical that they can even do an IPO this year.
So, let's have a let's have a quick watch of this. Uh well, we are here at the New York Stock Exchange, Sarah. So, I I so you know you'll get the question about how you're thinking about an IPO cuz there were there's some reporting that in internally you voiced some skepticism around how soon OpenAI would be ready.
Is that true? My focus as the CFO is first of all on the business and we've talked about that can be getting the products out to consumers, getting the products out to enterprises. How do we keep building the team to do that and do that well. Then, how do I make sure that we also have the investment to be able to buy compute, to be able to pay amazing researchers um in order to create the best outcomes.
Um so, fundraising is always top of mind. We just closed a $122 billion round, I think, just a few weeks ago. Um so, fundraising is always top of mind, but how we do that, I think we do that in the way that creates most optionality for the company. But you could raise a lot more potentially by by taking it public.
Yeah. At a time where you need it. Yeah. I know you're getting it. $122 billion is bigger than any IPO ever. Yeah, I mean, by by orders of magnitude, So, that doesn't mean there's no rush. Um it means that we've given ourselves we've de-risked to some degree what we need to do. Um but we are always out there looking at who are the partners that can work with us when we want to fund more of our business.
Yeah. Okay, there are a few things that we should to take note of from Sarah Friar's interview there. First of all, Sarah Friar fails to deny the core allegation that she is against the IPO. She just tries to distract from it and says that oh, well, we actually just raised $122 billion from our recent private funding round that we did that we did.
Now, $122 billion it sounds like a lot of money and you would think, okay, they just raised so much money, maybe they don't have to do an IPO this year. However, if you look at if you listen carefully to Sarah Friar's exact language, you can tell that she is very nervous and she knows that this funding round that they did is is not enough.
They're going to need more money very soon. And specifically, she said this $122 billion funding round derisked to some degree their, you know, financial plans. So, this amount of money only derisked their financial position to some degree. That that implies that, you know, they're still in a financially vulnerable position.
And she also says, "Fundraising is always top of mind." So, even after raise you know, claiming to raise $122 billion, they're still focused on, you know, desperately trying to raise as much money as they can. And I think that it's important that we dig down deeper into this, you know, $122 billion funding round.
So, in March of 2026, OpenAI put out this press release claiming that they raised $122 billion. However, when we look at the details, um this is not actually true. So, they this $122 billion comes from a few different investors. The biggest investor was Amazon. Amazon agreed to invest $50 billion into OpenAI.
However, only 15 billion of that was paid up front. The remaining $35 billion will only be paid upon OpenAI conducting an IPO. So, in reality, to today, OpenAI only has $15 billion from Amazon. The second big investor was SoftBank. SoftBank said that they would invest $30 billion into OpenAI. However, that $30 billion investment is split up into three tranches of $10 billion each.
Uh the first tranche was paid in April, the second one will be paid in July, and the third one will be paid in October. The reason why SoftBank had to split up the investment into three different tranches is because SoftBank doesn't have the money. They are uh they are attempting to to secure loans.
So, they're trying to borrow money against their other assets to fund this uh to to fund this investment into OpenAI. So, SoftBank itself is getting, you know, financially desperate, and they're really having to, you know, go through great lengths to lever up and try to borrow money to make this investment.
Given how leveraged SoftBank is already, um even if they can scrape together this $30 billion to uh to invest in OpenAI, I doubt that they will be able to invest any more after this. The third big investor is Nvidia. Nvidia uh supposedly invested $30 billion into OpenAI as part of this funding round.
However, OpenAI Nvidia has not filed a Form 8-K uh an SEC Form 8-K disclosing the investment. Now, given the size of this supposed investment, you would think that that would warrant uh would warrant out filing an 8-K to disclose the turn the the details of it. So, I don't know if this Nvidia investment has actually happened.
Remember that last year Nvidia claimed that it would invest $100 billion into OpenAI. Turned out that was a lie, it never happened. So, who knows if this $30 billion is even real. And even if it is real, Jensen Huang has come out Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has come out publicly and said that this is the last time that Nvidia will ever invest into OpenAI.
So, even if they do get this $30 billion from Nvidia, there will be no more money from Nvidia in the future. And then finally, uh they raised $12 billion from you know, a variety a consortium of financial investors. So, venture capital firms, private equity funds. And interesting, they also sold uh they also sold shares to retail investors indirectly uh through the ARK Invest Venture Fund and the Robinhood Venture Fund, uh which is like a closed-ended fund that um invests in private companies.
We'll talk more about those shortly. But, in total, you know, even if we give them the benefit of the doubt uh and say that this $30 billion from SoftBank is actually going to arrive and the $30 billion from Nvidia is actually going to arrive. Okay, that gets them that's $122 billion. But, imagine that they don't do the IPO cuz Sarah Friar is skeptical of doing an IPO and thinks they shouldn't have do it this year.
Well, if they don't do the IPO, they will not get the $35 billion from Amazon. Which means they will only they won't be raising um $122 billion, they'll only be raising $87 billion. Now, $87 billion sounds like a lot of money. However, in conjunction with this funding uh from Amazon, they also signed a a spending commitment with Amazon Web Services.
So, prior to this, Amazon uh prior to this, OpenAI already committed to spend $38 Now, they increase that, adding another $100 billion on top of that. So, and that will be paid over the course of 8 years. So, OpenAI claims to that they've raised $122 billion. In reality, if they don't do an IPO, it's actually only $87 billion.
But then, at the same time, they add another $100 billion liability to Amazon. So, in terms of, you know, the financial balance, they're actually moving backwards, not forwards. They're accruing more liabilities than the cash that they raised. So, this is uh not looking good at all. And as far as the spending commitment, so if you in the media reports, um so, I think OpenAI, it was like a few months ago, they said that they had $600 billion of data center spending commitments over the coming years.
However, that was before they just added this $100 billion from Amazon. So, now they have $700 billion of spending commitments. And those commitments are going to start coming due pretty soon. Their single biggest commitment is with Oracle. And Oracle, they agreed to spend $300 billion over the course of um the course of 5 years.
So, that's $60 billion per year, and that begins in 2027. So, starting in 2027, they're going to have to pay $60 billion per year to Oracle. Plus, they have a a huge number of other commitments to Microsoft, Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, and others. So, this money that they raised from the funding round, it will almost certainly be gone by 2027, if not earlier.
And that explains Sam Altman's desperation of why he really wants to do an IPO cuz he wants to, you know, have OpenAI be a publicly traded company so we can start dumping stock onto retail investors. Now, the second thing we're going to talk about is last month, uh so in in late March of 2026, it was reported in the media that OpenAI was establishing this very weird joint venture with a bunch of private equity firms where these private equity firms would resell ChatGPT to their portfolio companies and in return OpenAI would like give them back some of the profits.
We made a video about this um on our main channel Wall Street Millennial a few weeks ago. Uh but it's the it's it's a very weird, bizarre circular financing thing that they were um that OpenAI was supposedly going to do with a bunch of private equity firms. So, in that same CNBC interview from a few days ago, the host asks Sara Friar about this private equity joint venture.
And Sara Friar's response was very interesting. So, let's have a listen. Yeah, I noticed that there was a report about working with private equity on a new on a new venture. How how What does that look like? Um in in terms of like the different buckets of capital, private equity is definitely one. Um the one I'm actually more excited about is actually starting to work on the retail side, too.
So, as you know from the raise we did, we went to the banks. We thought we'd raise about a billion dollars from retail. We raised three. Um but then since then, we have worked with both ARK and now just with Robinhood, so RBI um Robinhood Ventures, uh to start to put it into the hands of the general public.
One thing I think a lot about in our mission, it's about access. How do we democratize access to technology? We are this iterative deployment company, but how do we also create access to the economic value that's being created? So, Sara Fryer completely dodges the question. She refuses to even talk about this private equity joint venture.
And the fact that she refuses to talk about it, that makes me think that this private equity joint venture is not going well. Maybe the private equity firms have pulled out or for whatever reasons it's you know it's it's being it is a disappointment. So, I don't think they're actually going to be able to raise much money from private equity.
That's why she is that's why she is not refusing to answer the question. So, instead of selling shares to private equity, they're instead focusing on selling shares to unsophisticated retail investors. Specifically, she talks about they sold $3 billion of shares to Robin to the Robinhood Ventures Fund as well as the ARK Invest Venture Fund.
So, what the Robinhood Venture Fund is So, Robinhood created a closed-ended fund that invests in privately held companies including Open AI, and then retail investors can purchase shares of this closed-ended fund on the stock market. Now, this is really um the best of both worlds from Sara Fryer's perspective.
So, So, Sara Fryer and Sam Altman are both in agreement that they want to be able to sell shares, dump shares onto unsophisticated retail investors. But, the difference is Sara Fryer doesn't want to actually do an IPO because then then they would have to disclose their financial statements, which probably look like a disaster.
So, instead of doing that, she is trying to have her cake and eat it, too, by selling shares indirectly selling the shares to retail investors by first selling it to Robinhood Ventures, and then Robinhood Ventures sells shares to retail investors. And this way, they are not required to actually publish any of their financial statements.
The problem is the amount of money that they can actually raise from these closed-ended funds. But the amount of money that they can actually raise from these closed-end funds is limited. So, she brags about having sold $3 billion to Robinhood Ventures and Arc Invest, but that's really a drop in the bucket when they have over $700 billion of spending commitments, which will soon start to come due.
So, overall, OpenAI is a huge disaster. Um So, will they actually IPO in the first in the fourth quarter of 2026? I think they probably will do the IPO because they have to. Despite all of Sara Friar's concerns, I think they have to do the IPO cuz remember, if they don't do the IPO, they don't get that $35 billion from Amazon, and they desperately need the money.
So, that wraps it up for everything I had to talk about today. As always, if you have any opinions or thoughts about OpenAI, please let us know in the comments section below, and we will see you all on the next video.
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