Sam Altman says ‘enough’ to questions about OpenAI’s revenue

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that the company is doing “well more” than $13 billion in annual revenue — and he sounded a little testy when pressed on how it will pay for its massive spending commitments.

His comments came up during a joint interview on the Bg2 podcast between Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the partnership between their two companies. Host Brad Gerstner (who’s also founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital) brought up reports that the company is currently bringing in around $13 billion in revenue — a sizable amount, but one that’s dwarfed by more than $1 trillion in spending commitments for computing infrastructure that OpenAI has made for the next decade.

“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that,” Altman said. “Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer. I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares.”

“Including myself,” Gertner interjected.

Altman then added that there are critics who “talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy our shares.”

In fact, he said that although there are “not many times” when he wants OpenAI to be a public company, “One of the rare times it’s appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous ‘OpenAI is about to go out of business’ [posts], I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that.”

Altman acknowledged that there are ways the company “might screw it up” — for example by failing to get access to enough computing resources — but he said that “revenue is growing steeply.”

“We are taking a forward bet that it will continue to grow, and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value,” he added.

Nadella, who laughed through much of Altman’s answer, also claimed that OpenAI has “beaten” every business plan that it’s given Microsoft as an investor.

Gertner returned to the subject of OpenAI’s revenues and IPO plans later in the interview, when he speculated about the company reaching $100 billion in revenue in 2028 or 2029.

“How about ‘27?” Altman countered.

At the same time, he denied reports that OpenAI plans to go public next year.

“No no no, we don’t have anything that specific,” Altman said. “I’m a realist, I assume it will happen someday, but I don’t know why people write these reports. We don’t have a date in mind, we don’t have a board decision to do this or anything like that. I just assume it’s where things will eventually go.”