Keep pulling the thread on Sebastian Mallaby.
OpenAI was valued at $852 billion post-money in its last funding round.
OpenAI reportedly proposed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, valued at roughly $43 billion, as a method to share AI's upside with the public.
OpenAI has reportedly delayed its plans for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) until 2027.
In a January article, Sebastian Mallaby predicted that OpenAI would run out of money within the following 18 months.
Internal OpenAI documents from January projected a burn rate of $660 billion over the next five years.
Sebastian Mallaby claims that OpenAI has canceled its video generation model, Sora, because it was a 'total money loser'.
Approximately two-thirds of OpenAI's announced $122 billion fundraising round consisted of future promises conditional on an IPO and payments-in-kind, such as access to compute, rather than cash.
According to journalist Ed Zitron, OpenAI generated $13 billion in revenue and spent $34 billion last year, resulting in a $21 billion operating loss.
Sebastian Mallaby predicts there is a 50% chance that by the summer of 2025, OpenAI will be unable to go public and will have to sell itself at a discount to a company like Amazon or Microsoft.
Sebastian Mallaby's strategy for OpenAI to escape its valuation predicament is for Sam Altman to give the U.S. government a 5% stake, making the company 'too important to fail'.
According to research by Jonathan Hillman at the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. government has taken or announced equity stakes in 30 private companies since January 2025.
Since the U.S. government took a stake in the company, Intel's stock has increased by almost 400%, significantly outperforming the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX), which was up 150%.