The OpenAI Problem Is About To Become OUR Problem

TL;DR

OpenAI's financial collapse or IPO success both hurt ordinary people — either crashing markets or eliminating jobs at massive scale.

Key Points

• 1.OpenAI burns billions monthly with a $730B valuation, yet loses money on every customer even at top subscription tiers, with no clear path to profitability.
• 2.A $110B investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank keeps the company alive temporarily, but the business case only holds if user growth, retention, and AGI development all stay on track simultaneously.
• 3.OpenAI's Pentagon deal to enable autonomous armed drones triggered a user boycott and talent flight, directly undermining all three investor confidence metrics at once.
• 4.AI cost per million tokens dropped from $11 in 2022 to $0.09 in 2025, meaning AI is becoming a commodity — dangerous for OpenAI, which has no other business to fall back on unlike Google or Microsoft.
• 5.OpenAI's IPO could be the largest in history at ~$40B float minimum; combined with SpaceX and Anthropic IPOs, the $450B total raised could exceed net US market buying activity for an entire year.
• 6.Large index funds like Vanguard and BlackRock would be forced to sell existing holdings to reweight for these massive instant-entrants, potentially triggering a broad market selloff affecting ordinary investors' retirement accounts.