When it comes to OpenAI, smart money is starting to do the math out loud. And something doesn’t add up. On surface, today’s news that OpenAI is offering 17.5% guaranteed returns to private equity firms looks like a shot at the Anthropic threat. Scratch the surface, and you start to see the story behind the story.

The PE deal is the kind of deal you do when you’ve borrowed against the future and the future is taking longer than expected.

Remember a few weeks ago when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (one of the backers of OpenAI) said that OpenAI was not a well-run business. Now Thoma Bravo founder Orlando Bravo is saying it out loud. Bravo walked away from the JV idea after questioning the long-term profit profile. It is not a coincidence that two smart money operators are arriving at the same conclusion. Just different words.

As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, (and in my breakdown of Nvidia GTC, Jensen’s Trillion Dollar Token Factory, for CrazyStupidTech) we are at an inference inflection. What that means is that AI goes from being in the “capex” phase to being in the “opex” phase. That shift is why you see Anthropic adding a billion or so in revenue every week or so. And that is why OpenAI is in a tizzy. And that is why Elon Musk has made “coding” a top priority for his Grok. All three companies are about “business” and revenues and not just promises.

OpenAI is good at promises. Especially the promises of a limitless future. And it has done a good job of borrowing against that future. Except, that future isn’t arriving or arriving fast enough.

It announced the $110 billion funding round, while only about $25 billion was near-term committed capital. Stargate was a $500 billion infrastructure promise. Oops. Each of these moments followed the same logic. Project confidence so large that the world treats it as reality. The reported PE deal is just the latest version of the same story.

The question to ask is why is OpenAI willing to guarantee 17.5 percent return? What gives. My harsh read of the situation is that the company needs money, and private equity is the last large pool of capital it can tap. And that tells you something about how many other doors OpenAI has already knocked on.

Here I go again with more questions than answers.

When I look at the news about the joint ventures, I read it as OpenAI cannot afford the cost of selling to big companies on its own. Deploying engineers to customize models for clients is expensive, slow, and margin-destroying. The joint venture shifts that cost onto PE firms while they think they’re buying access. They’re not. They’re picking up the actual cost of the work, dressed up as a partnership. It is a smart move, especially when you are preparing for a public offering.

Here is the line buried in the Reuters report that you should read again and again. The joint venture structure would provide “clearer segment reporting that can support the IPO narrative.”

Loosely translated (and financial analysts would be better to break this down), the JV structure allows OpenAI to create a line item that makes it look like it has recurring enterprise revenue, which is exactly what IPO bankers need to justify a valuation of a trillion dollars. The real product here is not AI. It is an IPO prospectus.

Maybe I am completely off base. There is almost certainly something we don’t know. There might be a product breakthrough that changes everything. OpenAI has surprised before.

However, it is hard to ignore that both Jensen and Bravo raised issues around OpenAI as a business. After all, no healthy business needs to offer terms that OpenAI is offering. You know why this is happening. It is because the need for cash is real. And the need to go public and get that cash is even more real. That 17.5 percent guarantee is just a magic number in magic math.

Previously on this topic:

• OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
• The Great AI Game vs AI Theater
• $110 Billion in Name Only
• Mad Money: The Big AI Race
• The Debt Beneath the Dream

An update to More Magic Math from OpenAI

The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. Some confirm my thesis, and one surprise, though not really.

So, the company says the round closed. $122 billion in committed capital, up from the $110 billion announced in February. Does committed mean money has passed the transom? We won’t know. What we do know is that at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the anchors are Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Microsoft participated again, though not clear for how much. The additional $12 billion came from a who’s who of institutional money, including a16z, Sequoia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, Temasek, D1, and Dragoneer. The FOMO gang!

So many brand-name investors show up at the last minute because none of them want to miss out on the sweet IPO pop. It surely will win them points with their own (limited partner) investors. I guess FOMO is also an affliction for the super rich.

By the way, nothing puts more in “t “less is more,” than more itself. In 2024, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion and sold about 4 percent of the company. In 2026, they raised $122 billion, twenty times more, by selling roughly 14 percent. Existing insiders and early employees must be in heaven.

To be clear, the circular financing problem hasn’t gone away. Amazon’s $50 billion is tied to an eight-year AWS contract. Nvidia’s contribution is compute, not cash. When I wrote about this in March, it was just an observation. Now it has a name. Bloomberg, Reuters, and others are now calling it “circular financing.”

OpenAI says it now has a $4.7 billion credit line from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. That’s not a lending syndicate. That’s an IPO underwriter roster auditioning for the job. It reminds me of those lining up outside Don Corleone’s room on his daughter’s wedding day. The credit facility is the gift they bring to get in the room.

Now let’s talk about the fix. The $3 billion in investments from individual investors. Axios reports that they are customers of three of the largest banks. Wait, the same three large banks that extended the credit facility and want to be part of the IPO underwriting syndicate. More circular economy at work.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told Axios, “We are really trying to take to heart our mission, which is AGI for the benefit of humanity and thinking about access. Not just access to the technology, but also access to the economic upside that it’s driving.” That’s a nice line. It’s also an IPO marketing strategy.

OpenAI said it will be included in several ARK Invest ETFs. Cathie Wood, who previously invested in OpenAI through her venture arm, now gets to channel her retail base into pre-IPO OpenAI shares. Think about what that is. A private company, not yet public, getting into retail ETFs. That’s a new thing. It’s smart, too. You create demand before the IPO. You distribute the story. You make millions of people feel like they have skin in the game before you even file. That’s the fix.

ARK is overrated, to put it mildly. ARK’s flagship fund peaked in February 2021, then fell 75 percent. Five years later, a thousand dollars invested then is worth about $573 today. And ARK is the vehicle OpenAI chose to democratize the upside. Make of that what you will.

One last thing. OpenAI is quietly pivoting, shutting down Sora, its much-hyped video app, and concentrating resources on a “superapp” for developers and business users, with coding assistants at the center. Why? Because enterprise is exactly where Anthropic is eating their lunch. The $122 billion has bought more time to beat the competition. And did you notice that CFO Friar is doing all the press versus Sam?

You focus this hard because you want to go public. Fast. After all, you don’t want to be the one without a chair when the music stops. Your move, Dario!

Previously on this topic:

• More Magic Math from OpenAI?
• OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
• $110 Billion in Name Only
• The Debt Beneath the Dream

“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin

In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.

“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026

Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.

To recap, OpenAI, weeks if not months before its public offering, has acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN). It is a daily, three-hour live tech talk show hosted by founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan. The show had 58,000 YouTube subscribers, $5 million in revenue last year, and a cult following in Silicon Valley. It was profitable, had no outside investors, and was growing fast. As a former media person, any media exit is a good exit. Congratulations to the founders.

Now let’s dig into what OpenAI really bought and why.

Think of TBPN as a room. A room where people in tech come and talk openly, without having to worry about the antagonistic queries that big media is often posing them. They go because it feels like peers talking, not press interrogating.

If you lived through Internet 1.0, CNBC’s morning show had the same vibe. ESPN’s SportsCenter did the same for the cable sports revolution. They don’t speak to power. They amplify power. TBPN made that playbook its own.

The best part of the announcement is where TBPN sits inside the OpenAI org and who it reports to. The show sits under “strategy” (and not communications) and will report to Chris Lehane. He is OpenAI’s chief political operative, the man associated with coining “vast right-wing conspiracy” as a deflection tactic during the Clinton White House years, who built Fairshake, the crypto super PAC that spent hundreds of millions targeting anti-crypto candidates in 2024.

You don’t put an editorially independent media property under your political operative. That’s not a media strategy. That is part of overall strategy. But they still have to sell it as keeping it editorially independent. Pravda was technically editorially independent too.

Anyway, maybe I have lost my rose-tinted glasses, but when a company says “do no evil,” you know what they are going to do. And if a press release mentions editorial independence four times, you know where that is going. And if you have to invent a new phrase, “Editorial Independence Covenant,” then I don’t really need to spell it out for you.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” — Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, invented the PR industry. He thought of it as a key part of corporate design. He was hired by corporations such as United Fruit and American Tobacco to do exactly what OpenAI is doing now. Build the perception layer around a product by presenting it as a massive societal shift.

The Soviet term was agitprop. The Silicon Valley term is earned media strategy. A century apart, history still rhymes.

Related Reading

• OpenAI: The Fix Is In — How OpenAI is engineering its IPO narrative through circular financing and retail ETFs.
• OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO) — On Simo, Facebook-style engagement loops, and the real game being played.
• More Magic Math from OpenAI — The PE deals, the JV structure, and why the real product is the IPO prospectus.
• The New Announcement Economy — How OpenAI mastered the press release as a capital-raising instrument.

Every few years a startup comes along that dominates the headlines and grabs all the attention. For all the right and wrong reasons. I have been following the industry long enough to see that pattern repeat itself. Netscape, Amazon, Facebook, and more recently, OpenAI.

The headlines are driven by the curiosity of the masses. And then curiosity of the masses drives the headlines. This is an endless loop, till we move on to something new. A lot of you might have forgotten that Facebook’s every move was dissected in the press. It even merited two dedicated blogs, AllFacebook and Inside Facebook. And that’s not to mention other consumer-focused technology blogs.

OpenAI is part of the larger curiosity, and fear about AI, which is dominating the global attention sphere. It is dominating the investments, it is dominating the policies, and it is dominating the social dynamics. OpenAI, to put it bluntly, is the most visible manifestation of the AI revolution. Just as Facebook became the face of social media. Remember my essay, Neo Symbolic Capitalism.

This past week was a perfect example of OpenAI sucking all the attention. So much so, it put the much more relevant and bigger story, of Claude Code being leaked into the shadows. There were the persistent rumors of their public offering (and I wrote about them.) There was an out-of-the-blue acquisition of TBPN. And more recently, the news that there was a shake up in the executive ranks. And the news that their CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo is taking a medical leave.

I try my best not to get too distracted by the bits and bobs, but there is a tidbit you might enjoy.

Looks like OpenAI will drop a new model next week, code-named Spud, that is going to be a big leap forward for them. This is a broadside against Anthropic. And it is so compute intensive that OpenAI will need to focus its resources. That is the primary reason it has decided to put the kibosh on Sora, though that’s not how the headlines framed it. Anyway. Let’s see how this new model pans out.

Here are seven stories I recommend.

• 30 Years of Nature Biotechnology. The cost of sequencing a human genome fell faster than the cost of computing itself. Then the exponential curve broke, because reading genomes turned out to be the easy part. Interpretation is where the noise lives. AI has emerged as an answer, helping make clearer predictions. [Nature Biotechnology]
• Inside Nepal’s Fake Rescue Racket. The Kathmandu Post investigates one of the most sophisticated insurance fraud networks in the world. Trekking guides in the Himalayas terrify tourists into believing they’re dying of altitude sickness, call in helicopters, check them into hospitals, and file insurance claims that bear no resemblance to what happened. [Kathmandu Post]
• Sora: A Solution Without a Problem. Sora went from number one on the App Store to discontinued in six months. The problem was never technical. It was creative. [Kaptur]
• Whatever Happens to Music Will Happen to AI. Bruce Sterling, who is two years older than artificial intelligence itself, compares AI to the great musical disruptions: the birth of opera, jazz, rock and roll. His argument is that AI is a fad, but not merely a fad. You can’t wait for it to blow over. A lot of it will blow over, but a lot of things will be blown flat by it. [Medium]
• Shakesville’s Unravelling and the Not-So-Golden Age of Blogging. Joanna Mang at The Outline tells the story of Shakesville, a progressive blog that started in 2004 and collapsed into something between a community and a cult. It was good to revisit this piece from 2019. It feels so prophetic about the awfulness of the current internet. [The Outline]
• Apple’s 50th Anniversary: Tim Cook on Why He Still Chases Crazy Ideas. Ryan D’Agostino’s Esquire profile of Tim Cook is one of the best Cook interviews in years. “It’s definitely still his company,” Cook says. The piece also covers the tariff calculus, the $600 billion U.S. manufacturing commitment, and Cook’s insistence that engagement with every administration is the only path forward. [Esquire]
• Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Hanif Abdurraqib writes about Jay-Z’s 1996 debut for GQ, and it’s not really about the music. Thirty years later a grown up billionaire shares his story. I am no fan of Jay-Z, but this was a great read. [GQ]

From CrazyStupidTech:

• Remembering the iPhone — Fred Vogelstein revisits the astonishingly analog development of the iPhone on Apple’s 50th birthday. Could AI have built it? Not a chance.

What I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• Why OpenAI Bought TBPN — To understand OpenAI’s decision to buy an upstart media company we have to go back more than a century.
• OpenAI: The Fix Is In — How OpenAI is engineering its IPO narrative through circular financing and retail ETFs.
• Minimal and Abstract Pen Photography — It is not the object, but what it represents. Some reflections on my recent experiments with photography.

April 5, 2026. San Francisco

“Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.” — @paulg

Anytime anyone underestimates or tries to do an end run around @sama, I remind myself of this golden nugget from PG, the man who knew him best before he became Sam the man. Just a reminder for present and future @OpenAI employees and investors. (My Tweet)

Over the past week or so I noticed that CFO Sarah Friar and AGI chief Fidji Simo were doing the press. Why them and not Sam? We know Sam loves being in the spotlight. Was there some kind of palace coup in the works?

Well, there might have been something to my late night ruminations. The Information reports that Altman has excluded Friar from key financial meetings. She has been reporting to Simo, not him, since August 2025. Ironic, considering OpenAI plans to go public soon and the CFO is a key player. Simo is now taking medical leave to treat an ongoing neuroimmune condition.

PG quote looms large!

April 5, 2026. San Francisco