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Comment by amusingimpala75 | Hacker News Reader

How does a company even consider this while the CFO is privately saying the books / revenue accounting are not ready for public scrutiny?

Edit: Or has so much somehow changed in two weeks that it’s no longer necessary to wait until next year?

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These companies are burning enough cash that they will need to be public.

We’re about to have 3 of the worlds’s largest corporations be massively in the red.

Don't worry - they'll make it up with volume!

Compound effect… compound red numbers? /s

Anthropic said they’ll be profitable by q2 of this year.

https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...

In my mind, if they believed that they would IPO now, and not still be courting investors (which I believe they are still doing).

At the size of IPO courting investors is inevitable. You need to make sure that there is enough money available.

i say i'll be a millionaire by the end of this year.

I believe, but could be wrong, is that the big change is the time frame for index and managed funds buy in. It used to be a year, but it's much shorter now, like 2 weeks. Which means as long as they can maintain a high market cap relative to their exchange for that time period they will be stabilized by institutional funds and basically crowd sourcing any losses to the public and massively cashing out the internal pre-ipo investors.

At least that's my understanding of the current market dynamics regarding IPOS, if I'm wrong that would be great, and if someone else would explain it even better.

I think some ETFs need just 5 trading days for it to show. For S&P500, to my knowledge, the stock needs to be traded at least for 1 quarter.

Yeah it’s a scam

The CFO doesn't even report to Sam Altman directly. I would not assume that the decision is up to her in any meaningful way. I predicted a while ago and still stand by an 80% chance that their S1 is disastrous on the scale of WeWork; so, so much of what people think they know about OpenAI's finances is based on snippets and rumors rather than firm audited statements.

Sarah Friar, the CFO, took both Nextdoor and Block public.

They’ll be using every trick in the book to massage the numbers as much as possible, but even so it’s hard to see how an S1 for OpenAI or Anthropic doesn’t look pretty terrible

Current administration might rig the rules to take the credit of AI boom.

Even third world doesn't have this much shameless and corrupt regime as much as this one is.

What is the third world in 2026?

"Developing nations" if you will. Like these days banks are referring to labour class as "low quality human capital".

Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.

> "Developing nations" if you will

I wouldn't, I'm not sure which nations are developing or that they're developing into. Aren't we all developing all the time?

> Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.

That's great, could you just explain the underlying reality without the loaded terms then?

People usually use the term for poorer countries, as opposed to the rich ones. Originally third world meant those not aligned with the USSR or NATO, I believe.

I get the meaning of "third world" but the USSR hasn't existed for decades, is China the modern equivalent? And it wasn't made clear why a neutral country like Switzerland would be expected to be highly corrupt while Russia would be low in corruption. Or indeed why Switzerland would be seen as a country in the process of becoming financially rich.

Right. I'm saying the meaning has shifted, and doesn't mean that any more.

> How does a company even consider this while the CFO is privately saying the books / revenue accounting are not ready for public scrutiny?

Perhaps they will just tell a lot of lies.

In the past people would generally avoid this when it came to stock market filings for fear of legal consequences, but the OpenAI C-Suite is already at least +$26 million to Trump and has plenty more to send his way if that doesn't cover it.

Crime is legal in 2026 (if you can afford the kickback fees).

Crime is legal, but investors can and will dissect your 10-Q/10-K statements. Anyway, I think that the Administration covering their asses in the face of doubtful numbers will shake investor confidence in the tech field. In fact, most investors will think one of these two things:

1. "Look, even OpenAI, which is the face of the LLM tech with ChatGPT, needs assistance from POTUS to stay afloat, the tech is not profitable"

2. "Crap, all this circular economy going on with Nvidia/OpenAI/... is bogus after all if even OpenAI needs the White house support to survive. There is not enough demand".

Regardless of the specifics, if this sentiment spread enough (and it doesn't have to be the majority of investors) everyone, regardless of their beliefs, will start selling to avoid being the last one standing when the music stops.

Right, that's why TSLA is worth what... pennies? /s

I'm guessing they had a significant revenue spike from gpt 5.4 and gpt 5.5 being so good at coding, and hiccups at anthropic making it easier for programmers to try the models.

They say that the CFO isnt ready for public scrutiny and deny her access to the accounting.

Given the nature of private conversations, I suppose there is no source to this claim?

Can't they just tell GPT-5.5 to fix their books, make no mistakes? Are the accountants also not replaceable by AI when doctors, lawyers and engineers are?

Maybe they need those accountants to buy stock first before they put them all out of work?

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