It’s because this IPO is backed by those who grew up through the boom and bust of the dotcom era, so they know now to do all their growth in secret behind the scenes and then dump onto the market when there’s nothing more in that tank. Rather than letting the public have any major growth out of their baby, and only letting the price discovery phase work one way.

> zero information on how it’s doing

I think the fact that we have so little information is the most important information we have. If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.

All of this continued stalling and obfuscation can only mean one thing, IMO: OpenAI has no long-term viability and they're desperately hoping for some new breakthrough to reinvent their business model before the VC money faucets turn off for good.

There are bits and pieces of info scattered everywhere but no coherent picture. We know from a16z report [1] that only 2% of US households pay for AI subscriptions, so most of the seat based pricing comes from business and enterprise agreements. We know that OpenAI ads business has $1 billion USD in annualised revenue run rate [2]. We know from OpenRouter data [3] that in 2025 70% of the API token spend was across all the proprietary models (Anthropic did very well in 2025, while OpenAI clawed back market share in 2026).

It all starts to look like a very low margins business, and reminds me very much of telecom industry.

[1] https://www.a16z.news/p/state-of-markets-ii

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/openais-ad-bu...

[3] https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai

Nobody is quiet about doing well. And the frenetic release schedule of kinda half baked products tells a story (not a good one)

What regulation makes it so that a large private company would have to go public? You have it backwards. Increased regulations make it more burdensome for a company to go public, driving companies like OpenAI to remain private. If you made it less expensive and burdensome to IPO (decreased regulation), you would see companies go IPO earlier.

This also coincides with a growing market for private credit and VC which certainly helps companies stay private for longer.

it really is a privatize the gains socialize the losses situation, isn't it? due to the new rules (or lack thereof), public investors didn't have access to all that growth.

no way it ever gives you a return like, say, the amazon IPO could've.

>Right now we have a ~$1 trillion company which a ton of the “economy” and valuations are based on, with near zero information on how it’s doing.

This is definitely by design and encouraged by the VC’s. It’s disgusting to consider what a simulacrum of a market the stock market has actually become.

What past regulations would have forced OpenAI to go public sooner?

> This is an interesting shift compared to the past where OpenAI would’ve been public a long time ago (due to various regulations) so we would have much more direct insight.

There's a good recent YouTube video about the shift in regulations that switched IPOs from being a way to raise money for growth to being a way to dump on retail investors after all the significant growth has been funded by private investors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roe3SgezmmU

They would go public if they were doing well.

I agree with you for sure, but fwiw there’s a simpler alternate explanation, or at least there’s another way of saying the same thing

I’ve asked at rapidlu growing unicorns where I’ve worked “why don’t we ipo” and the big wigs every time just say, “why?”

If the original point of the ipo was to raise money and now you can do that privately, it stands to reason that a simple explanation might be that it’s not worth the hassle until the VC’s say they want their money back

How much money do they have left? It is hard for me to see how OpenAI doesn't fail at this point. There is no business, no moat. Honestly, the best outcome seems like failing up into a Microsoft acquisition at this point.