alt Hacker NewsThis all smells fishy. They didn’t “raise” $122B. Raise means someone put funds in your bank account and said send us the next quarterly report to tell us how our investment is doing.
They have pieces from paper of folks saying they may put up funds or goods and services in that amount. But it’s important to remember that:
1. While they are “raising” commitments others are backing out of deals (see Disney, various data center things). Big deals announced to major fanfare are falling through.
2. They slashed capital expenditure for the future after previously boasting about all the commitments. This is turning into bonkers math of X + Y - X + Z + W - 1/2 of Y = ? On trying to keep track of what’s actually “raised / real” vs what was PR puffery that folks ran away from later.
3. Circular financing still seems to be going on. Big difference of here’s cash, have fun and various “commitments” and balance sheet games that seem to still be going on.
Net net this all still looks very scary and iffy at best.
Replies
Are we truly arguing semantics on HN which is a news aggregator for startups and everyone truly knows what a "raise" is and it is obviously not funds in your bank account? I don't disagree with the rest of your comment and the core thesis is valid that OpenAI is very much doing circular financing.
Edit: A raise comes with stipulations on what you can use the money for. I don't know if I was being too mean about responding to a parent but before you comment just google what a raise has..
If OpenAI goes down their investors will lose any chance at getting their money back. They need to keep pretending things are going great for as long as possible.