According comments apparently delivered anonymously to the Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin and Corrie Driebusch, OpenAI’s relentless push toward a 2026 initial public offering (IPO) may not be so relentless after all. OpenAI is being advised it seems, to relent until next year.
A Journal report earlier this week from Jin said OpenAI—which is private, and doesn’t have to report revenue publicly—had missed its recent revenue targets.
In their new profile of OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, Jin and Driebusch write that Friar has:
“[…]taken a closer look at OpenAI’s spending commitments, and has privately suggested waiting until 2027 for an IPO, cautioning that the company isn’t yet ready to meet the rigorous reporting standards required of public companies.”
The Journal compares Friar to other women in Silicon Valley famous for taming brash male founders: Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who famously made Facebook (later Meta) into a profitable business, and SpaceX’s adult in the room, Gwynne Shotwell. It also points out that she oversaw the IPO of Jack Dorsey’s payments company Square, and that Square’s stock plunged by 10% shortly after she resigned.
Friar also oversaw the SPAC-enabled shift to public company status at Nextdoor (The stock “tumbled,” per the Journal). Friar also, it should be noted, oversaw Nextoor’s grisly round of layoffs in 2023, in which 25% of the staff was let go. The following year she made the move from Nextdoor to OpenAI.
The company she joined is one under extreme pressure to become nothing less than a world-leading colossus that remakes technology and the global economy to fit its vision. Confidence in its ability to realize that vision is currently shakier than it has been since it rose to fame in the wake of the release of ChatGPT.
OpenAI needs revenue as it spends money in world-historic fashion. A report late last year based on internal documents put OpenAI’s commitment to spending $1.4 trillion over eight years on data centers in a somewhat frightening context: it was set to lose $74 billion in 2028 alone, the very same year its main rival, Anthropic, was on course to break even, thanks in no small part to its rapid buildup of revenue-generating enterprise customers.
According to the Journal’s new report, banks have been overtly telling OpenAI and Anthropic point blank that they’re in a winner-take-all race to IPO glory. As the Journal writes, they’ve said “whoever makes it to market first will get to define the new industry.“
But that same Journal report says in “recent months” Friar has reportedly started to express worry, and has sought to bridle OpenAI’s outflow of cash on data centers in the absence of higher revenue. Worse, she has apparently suggested the company may need to put the brakes on its IPO, even as CEO Sam Altman slams on the accelerator.
Google’s recent earnings call painted a rosy picture of AI-derived revenue, with that side of its business bringing in a respectable $20 billion, additional disquieting news for OpenAI.
The Journal heard back from an OpenAI spokesman apparently, who claimed that OpenAI has actually hit its revenue goals for the first quarter of the year, and that it has goals known only internally. These goals, the spokesperson apparently said, are different from those the company’s investors know about.
In a request for comment sent to OpenAI, Gizmodo asked for clarity about what it told the Wall Street Journal, and for a statement about this story generally. OpenAI did not respond immediately on Saturday, but we will update this article if we hear back.
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