OpenAI Kills Sora then Descends into Chaos

TL;DR

OpenAI shut down its Sora video app after just 103 days due to $15M daily costs, $2.1M lifetime revenue, and a strategic pivot toward enterprise AI and IPO preparation.

Key Points

• 1.Sora was costing OpenAI up to $15 million per day while generating only $2.1 million in lifetime revenue. Disney's entire $1 billion investment would have been burned through in roughly two months at that burn rate, making the economics, in team lead Bill Pebbles' words, 'completely unsustainable.'
• 2.Disney was blindsided by Sora's shutdown despite an active partnership. A Disney team was working on a Sora project on a Monday evening; 30 minutes after that meeting ended, they received the call it was being discontinued — prompting Disney to pull its investment entirely.
• 3.OpenAI is executing a sharp strategic pivot toward enterprise productivity, modeled on Anthropic's success. Anthropic's Claude Code grew enterprise market share from 18% to 29% in 2025, with 8 of the Fortune 10 as customers, while OpenAI's applications chief warned staff to stop being 'distracted by side quests.'
• 4.Figure Robotics CEO Brett Adcock publicly gave OpenAI an F-grade on their partnership. He said his internal team 'ran circles around them every day,' had difficulty getting them in the office, fired the OpenAI team, and suspected they were absorbing proprietary robotics knowledge to replicate it internally.
• 5.OpenAI raised $122 billion but the round is largely circular financing from self-interested parties. Amazon invested $50B (needs AI demand for AWS), Nvidia $30B (needs compute demand), and SoftBank $30B; meanwhile Bloomberg reports private OpenAI shares are finding no buyers on secondary markets, while investors rush toward Anthropic.
• 6.OpenAI spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring TBPN, a small tech podcast with only 70,000 daily viewers. Sam Altman admitted the purchase is about better marketing AI to the public, and TBPN has a formal NYSE partnership — relevant given OpenAI is targeting an IPO later in 2026.
• 7.The New Yorker published an 18-month investigation portraying Sam Altman as fundamentally untrustworthy. Internal memos cite a 'consistent pattern of lying'; a board member called him a sociopath; and his own mentor Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, reportedly told colleagues Altman had been lying to them throughout.