A potential mega IPO is coming into focus, but enthusiasm for life as a public-company CEO appears limited.
“Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the “Big Technology Podcast.” “Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying.”
He told host Alex Kantrowitz that while public markets can play a role in value creation, leading a public company comes with trade-offs he does not find appealing.
Don’t Miss:
OpenAI has not filed for an IPO, but talk about its potential valuation has picked up, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.
Internal estimates have reached as high as $1 trillion, and OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar is targeting a 2027 listing with a possible IPO filing in late 2026, Reuters reported in October.
Altman said on the podcast that he does not know whether OpenAI would go public in the near term and declined to discuss fundraising plans or valuation details. If realized, those valuation ranges would place OpenAI among the most valuable private companies discussed ahead of a public listing.
Trending: 7 Million Gamers Already Trust Gameflip With Their Digital Assets — Now You Can Own a Stake in the Platform Before the Raise Ends 1/19
“It’s wonderful to be a private company,” Altman said on the podcast. “We need lots of capital. We’re going to cross all of the shareholder limits and stuff at some point.”
He added that access to capital is a key consideration as OpenAI scales, even though no formal decision on an IPO has been announced.
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on artificial intelligence research, OpenAI later created a capped-profit arm to attract investment and in October completed a recapitalization that structured its commercial business as a public benefit corporation. Its nonprofit parent, the OpenAI Foundation, retains governance control of the for-profit group and holds an equity stake valued at about $130 billion.
The move also changed OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), reducing its ownership to about 27% and updating governance, intellectual property, and cloud partnership terms.
See Also: Missed Tesla? EnergyX Is Tackling the Next $200 Billion Opportunity — Lithium
Competition continues to shape OpenAI’s operations. According to an internal memo first cited by The Information, Altman told OpenAI employees he was declaring a “code red.”
