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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

Their company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that it makes sense to go public (for the current owners)

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Only if they can find a way to dress up their financials for the IPO filing. They don't want to get WeWorked.

Yes, Sam definitely doesn’t want to be holding this bag.

Yes he does - it makes him one of the most powerful people on earth.

"the power"

In the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.

Sam still doesn't have any equity.

People absolutely refuse to engage with this fact with even a modicum of substance.

Altman owns significant personal stakes in core technology, chip, and energy infrastructure sectors. His job is to hype AI so that the companies that supply the infrastructure behind it increase in value. When OAI becomes insolvent because their business model doesn't work, he can jump ship with no losses or liabilities.

This is a ludicrous theory for why he would turn down equity in OpenAI.

It really doesn't matter. They're doing secondary offerings for employees and individual holders, and they'll have no issue allowing private transactions for larger holders.

The general wealth distribution has shifted to the point that they do not need access to public funds, and frankly, if they can't find private funds for their needs, it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public.

> it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public

unless the public is clueless

The problem with secondary offerings is that it means that someone in the private markets winds up holding the bag. It is in the best interests of insiders to have the public holding the bag if and when things go south. Even if you don't believe it will ever go south, the profits OAI would need to generate to justify the investment the private markets have flooded into OAI are absolutely gargantuan, and they are generally not built to sit around for multiple years collecting distributions. They need to return money to their LPs, and soon.

The "private market" at this point is so huge though that you'll have an "insiders" private market, and an "outsiders" public market to dump the bag on that the insiders don't care about.

That's fair, but there is clearly agitation from some corners to IPO at some point.

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