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🐻 OPENAI — Company Profile (Teaching)

Teaching site, not investment advice. Private company does not file with SEC; figures come from official announcements + secondary reports, change frequently, so specific values are intentionally omitted — use the official announcement links below for verification.

Note: OPENAI is a private company, not publicly traded. Retail investors cannot directly buy OpenAI stock — indirect exposure mainly through MSFT (~27% diluted, LEDGER F-030) or SFTBY (~11%, LEDGER F-029).

📌 Basics

Dimension Content Source
Core business GPT-series large models + ChatGPT (consumer + enterprise) + API platform + DALL-E (image) + Sora (video) + Codex (coding agent) openai.com
Founded / HQ 2015 / San Francisco, USA wiki
CEO Sam Altman (since 2019; briefly fired for 5 days in 2023/11, LEDGER F-085) wiki
Primary "listing" Not public — Recapitalization complete on 2025/10/28: OpenAI Foundation (nonprofit) controls OpenAI Group PBC (for-profit, now a Public Benefit Corporation); equity: Foundation ~26% / Microsoft ~27% / current+former employees+investors ~47% OpenAI 2025/10/28 announcement + TechCrunch
SEC filings Does not file (not public) —
Fiscal year Not disclosed (private) —

💡 Valuation / revenue: specific figures intentionally omitted — see LEDGER F-041, F-042 for anchors; check OpenAI official announcement page for latest.

📐 LEDGER anchors (frozen-in-time)

Per LEDGER 2026/05/26 snapshot:

  • Valuation: $852B post-money (2026/03/31 official, F-041)
  • Operations (2026/03/31 official): ~$2B revenue/month (~$24B annualized), >900M WAU, >50M subs, enterprise revenue >40%, >15B tokens/min, Codex >2M weekly active (F-042)
  • MSFT stake: ~27% diluted (~$135B invested) (F-030)
  • SoftBank stake: ~11% (F-029)

When updating these figures, always cite the latest official announcement.

🏭 Supply Chain Coordinates (Part 1-C6 framework)

Upstream (Who OPENAI Depends On)

Supplier What flows Key dependency
NVDA H100/H200/Blackwell/Vera Rubin GPUs (NVDA-OpenAI 10GW deal, LEDGER F-024) Primary AI training / inference hardware
MSFT Azure remains primary cloud (post-2026/04/27 amendment, still primary but non-exclusive); ~$135B invested Strategic
ORCL OCI 5-year $300B (WSJ disclosed; ~54% of ORCL Q3 FY26 RPO) — Stargate equity partner Strategic
CRWV Dedicated capacity 5-year cumulative ~$22.4B Strategic
AMD AMD-OpenAI 6GW deal (LEDGER F-025) Strategic
AVGO Custom ASIC 10GW (multiple media reports; specific SOW undisclosed — AVGO Q4 earnings call reference) Long-term strategic
SFTBY + MGX + ORCL Stargate equity partners (F-022 US + F-023 UAE) Capital + siting partnership

Downstream (Who Depends on OPENAI)

Customer Relationship Concentration
Global ChatGPT WAU (>900M) Weekly actives (free + paid consumers) Highly diversified
ChatGPT paying subscribers (>50M) Consumer subscription ($20 Plus / $200 Pro) Highly diversified
API usage (>15B tokens/min) Developer + enterprise API calls (usage volume, not user count) Diversified
Enterprise (>40% revenue) Fortune 500 use ChatGPT Enterprise / API Increasing concentration

Competitors

  • Closed-source frontier models: ANTH Claude / GOOGL Gemini / XAI Grok
  • Open source: META Llama / DEEPSEEK (China) / Mistral / Qwen (BABA) / multiple Chinese labs
  • Application layer: Perplexity / Cursor (Anysphere, $29.3B valuation LEDGER F-060) / Harvey / Glean

💼 Business Model + Value Capture (Part 1-C7 view)

  • Revenue mix: Consumer subscriptions ~50%+ (ChatGPT Plus + Pro) / API + Enterprise ~40%+ (rising) / Other (DALL-E / commercial licenses) ~5%
  • Gross margin: Strongly inferred loss-making (training + inference cost far exceeds ARPU, but growth is astonishing) — private, not disclosed
  • Pricing power: ChatGPT Plus price unchanged for 4 years; Enterprise per-seat — medium (open-source price pressure + model commoditization trend)
  • Substitution difficulty: Medium — user habit (ChatGPT is a brand name), but the model itself is highly portable (LLM API is the precursor to commoditization)

🏰 Moat Assessment (Part 3-C2 Buffett 5-step lens)

Type Strength (0-1) Source
Brand 1.0 "ChatGPT" has become synonymous with AI — verb-ified like Google
Switching cost 0.4 Low individual switching cost; Enterprise custom GPTs / data training give some
Network effects 0.6 User feedback → training data → model quality → more users; Codex developer ecosystem
Scale + cost 0.5 Training frontier models is extremely capex-heavy (Stargate $500B); both moat and burden

Composite: 2.5 / 4 → extremely strong brand + financial/business model still evolving + heavy upstream/downstream interdependence

⚠️ Key Reverse-Trigger Conditions (Part 3-C5 anti-thesis view)

  • Trigger 1 (valuation): Next round down-round (valuation below $852B) — private AI valuation reset signal
  • Trigger 2 (quarterly): WAU growth stagnates (vs. current >900M trajectory)
  • Trigger 3 (annual): Open-source models (Llama / DeepSeek) frontier quality overtakes GPT — business model foundation shakes
  • Trigger 4 (event): Stargate $500B deployment delayed / scaled back — long-term compute support insufficient
  • Trigger 5 (low probability): MSFT exits partnership prematurely (post-2026/04 amendment, OAI is cross-cloud capable) — capital / compute pressure spikes

🔗 Teaching Cross-References

📚 Official Announcements + Primary Sources (look it up yourself)

Indirect exposure paths: Retail investors gain indirect exposure to OpenAI via MSFT (~27% stake) or SFTBY (~11% stake)

Teaching use · numbers change — learn the method, not the specific figures · investment decisions are based on your own research + risk tolerance