OpenAI被比作AI界WeWork：9名核心高管离职，自购70亿美元股票

remember how i said OpenAI might turn out to be the WeWork of AI?

remember how i said OpenAI might turn out to be the WeWork of AI? Ricardo @Ric_RTP OpenAI is falling apart right now. 9 of their most important leaders have left the company recently, and Altman is about to ask the public to buy the stock. 2 of them even walked out within 72 hours of OpenAI handing its own staff $7 billion in cash... On Monday, August 10, OpenAI completed a deal letting current and former employees sell roughly $7 billion worth of their shares. The price valued the company at $852 billion, the exact same number as its March funding round. On Tuesday, August 11, Brad Lightcap announced he was leaving after 8 years. He spent 4 of them as chief financial officer, then ran the company as chief operating officer from 2022 until April. He worked alongside Sam Altman at Y Combinator before OpenAI existed. On Thursday, August 13, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser announced she was leaving. She was hired in December from Salesforce, where she had been the CEO of Slack. In April she took over most of Lightcap's responsibilities. She lasted 8 months. The cash window opened Monday. By Thursday both executives who ran the business side were gone. But what's interesting is who actually wrote the $7 billion cheque: Every previous time OpenAI let its employees cash out, an outside investor bought the shares. In October, Thrive Capital, SoftBank and others put up $6.6 billion at a valuation near $500 billion. There was a $1.5 billion version of the same deal in 2024. This time OpenAI bought the shares back itself, using its OWN money. So no outside investor put a single dollar behind that $852 billion price. The company named its own number and then paid it. This is a business generating around $2 billion a month while losing roughly $1.22 for every single dollar it earns. And it just spent $7 billion of that cash buying its own stock at a number no third party ever tested. Here is the full list of the people who left since April: - Bill Peebles, who ran the Sora video app - Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for Science - Srinivas Narayanan, technology chief of B2B applications - Kate Rouch, chief marketing officer - Josh Achiam, chief futurist, after nearly nine years - Johannes Heidecke, head of Safety Systems - Chloe Bakalar, the only person at OpenAI whose entire job was ethics - Brad Lightcap - Denise Dresser Bakalar left in July. OpenAI never announced it, and NOBODY has replaced her. Fidji Simo stepped down the same month, and two thirds of the organization had been reporting to her. Greg Brockman absorbed most of her job. He also introduced Dresser's replacement this week, a Wiz executive named Dali Rajic. OpenAI filed its IPO paperwork confidentially on June 8. The full prospectus, the one with audited financials in it, still has not appeared. So the order of operations is worth sitting with... File the paperwork in June. Buy your insiders out in August at a price you set yourself. Watch the people who built the commercial side leave that same week. Then show the public the books. Retail investors will see those numbers for the first time in a document written after every one of these people had already made their decision. Sam Altman told staff in June that he expects to go public within the next year. Reporting since then has pointed at 2027 instead, and a tender offer of this size is usually what a company does when the listing is not close. Here is what I think happens next: That prospectus lands with a revenue line big enough to carry the story, and the executive turnover gets buried in the risk factors where almost nobody reads. The people who priced OpenAI at $852 billion this month were the same people who took the money out of it; and the next set of buyers will not get that arrangement. Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 2 🔄 5 ❤️ 19 👀 2683 📊 4 ⚡