>Without circular investments and valuations what would Open AI be worth? 100B? 300B? Entirely on revenue alone it seems like 20B. Current valuation appears to be two orders of magnitude off.

They just passed $20B in revenue, you can't really expect a company with this much hype and traction to have a 1x multiple.. that's not to say a 35x multiple makes sense either.

> $20B in revenue

All I see everywhere is "OpenAI generated $13 billion in revenue in 2025" and it just cost them $8 billion. $5B loss in 2025 and projections of losing $14B this year.

Let the retailers decide this year at IPO! The heavy bags must be carried by someone

Is this really the con? Be part of the in-group and buy pre-IPO shares to dump them on joe-six-pack shortly afterwards?

At least they don’t SPAC their way into the public market but the answer to your question is yes!

Always has been? (Well, with pyramid schemes anyway.)

I guess making the investment conditional on the company doing an IPO (or something that will never happen) should remove any doubts.

But I'm not sure there is enough money on the world (literally) for them to get an IPO high enough. If they sell too little of the company, they'll be still holding the bag when it fails.

Well technically "Open""AI" is a SaaS company. It should be worth almost nothing due to AI being able to code AI (AI training is probably the simplest enterprise code).