OpenAI is reportedly on the verge of a roughly $500 billion valuation, a determine that may make it essentially the most useful personal firm on this planet—greater than SpaceX, TikTok’s guardian firm Bytedance, and even public giants like Palantir. It’s a staggering quantity for a corporation with an “astronomical burn price.” How is that this even doable?
As Axios experiences, there are literally two offers in play: a SoftBank-led spherical valuing the corporate at $300 billion, which received’t shut till 12 months’s finish, and a secondary sale of worker shares at a far steeper $500 billion valuation. A lot of the cheaper shares have already been snapped up, leaving traders to combat over the pricier ones.
One OpenAI investor—who spoke on the situation of anonymity, citing an NDA—in contrast it to the daybreak of the web. “We’re in one of many largest expertise shifts [in history],” the investor tells me. “The outcomes proceed to get greater than individuals assume.”
The investor argues the maths for investing on the $500 billion valuation is simple: Hypothetically, if ChatGPT hits two billion customers and monetizes at $5 per person per 30 days—”half the speed of issues like Google or Fb”—that’s $120 billion in annual income.
“That alone would assist a trillion and a half greenback firm, which is a reasonably good return, simply fascinated about ChatGPT,” the investor says. “it would not embrace all the remainder of stuff they’re engaged on, all of the enterprise stuff, all of the agentic stuff, all the work they’re doing on {hardware}.”
Trillions of {Dollars}
The $5 determine is, admittedly, again of the envelope math. Immediately, ChatGPT has 700 million weekly energetic customers—and fewer than 10 % pay (OpenAI declined to touch upon this determine). The investor’s projections are bold, and appear to low cost the specter of main gamers like Google and Meta consuming OpenAI’s lunch. “The half a trillion greenback query now’s, to what extent will OpenAI have the ability to retain the purchasers that it has acquired, and concurrently have the ability to deliver its prices to some extent the place it could possibly, in reality, monetize at [hypothetically] $5 per person per 30 days,” says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York College’s Stern Faculty of Enterprise.
The guess right here is that OpenAI is the following Fb or Google. For traders shopping for in at $500 billion, “they’re anticipating an IPO above a trillion in two to a few years, in any other case the speed of return doesn’t justify the funding,” says Glenn Okun, who’s additionally a enterprise professor at NYU. That will imply leaping into the highest ten most beneficial public corporations on this planet virtually in a single day. The investor says they’ve an extended time horizon than that, however “in fact an IPO is essentially the most smart path given the dimensions of the corporate.” Although the investor admits, sure, the corporate would have to be valued at greater than $1 trillion to make the funding worthwhile.
Stranger issues have occurred—significantly to OpenAI. Within the first seven months of 2025, the corporate doubled its projected annual income to $12 billion, which might estimate OpenAI is bringing in about $1 billion per 30 days. Enterprise adoption has surged too, reaching 5 million paying enterprise customers this month. To not point out what potential promoting income may do to its backside line. To the investor, these are indicators of an organization with the momentum to win: “Individuals do not like unprecedented issues, as a result of most individuals prefer to sample match,” the investor says. “The whole lot this firm has finished has been unprecedented from the tempo of its income progress to the AI expertise.”