What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
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What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
Ed Zitron<br>Aug 18, 2026<br>34 min read
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If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter.<br>It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.<br>My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2). I've even done a two part Hater's Guide to NVIDIA.<br>Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. To subscribe, use one of the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.<br>If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on The Terminal.<br>I’m not trying to be a buzzkill here, but I have meaningful concerns about OpenAI’s ability to survive, and they’ve only grown more pressing in the last few years. In the same week that it completed a $7 billion internal share buyback, OpenAI saw both COO (and former CFO) Brad Lightcap and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Denise Dresser leave the company, the latter of which had only been there eight months, and had this to say a mere four months ago:<br>“I just have never seen this level of conviction spread so quickly and consistently within the industries,” Dresser told CNBC in April, as she was wrapping up her first 90 days on the job.<br>Dresser likely walked away from a large amount of stock options by leaving after less than a year on the job, which I’m guessing means she decided that staying at OpenAI would, for whatever reason, not be worth getting what I imagine are tens of millions of dollars of stock she would be able to liquidate when it went public. You know, that thing that’s definitely happening.<br>Unless it’s not quite so definite anymore. Back in late June, The New York Times reported OpenAI was “leaning toward” going public some time in 2027, but that was before Anthropic started one of the most-aggressive pre-IPO marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen, with investors “leaking” to the Financial Times that they thought it would have a $2 trillion valuation and have (sigh) annualized revenues of $100 billion to $120 billion by end of 2026, an entirely fictional statement made with the intent of pumping their bags, with the FT, for whatever reason, printing it with little pushback.<br>Yet what’s likely far-scarier for OpenAI is that even Anthropic’s pre-IPO marketing has a whiff of desperation. A Reuters report from late last week that feels precision-engineered to manipulate dimwitted investors said that “Wall Street [was] looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now,” adding that it was “projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion.”<br>This was arguably the worst part:<br>Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business.
For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.<br>While I imagine the writer in question believed that this was being “fair” and “objective,” this paragraph exists only to manufacture consent for a company that clearly has questionable economics. “Current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale” is a euphemism for “ignore your lying eyes,” a plea with the audience to not judge a company based on its actual business but on a theoretical business that, to quote Reuters, have “...training and inference [costs] become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales.”<br>Could, could, could, could, could, could could COULD! It’s always a bloody could or will or might with these fucking companies, and it’s astonishingly bad journalism to see it as an “objective” choice to vaguely say that a company should not be evaluated based on its actual business but on some theoretical business that they might build in the future where the economics are completely different.<br>Sidenote: t he defense of a...