Here's a twist on the typical IPO story: a CEO who might take his company public while openly admitting he has zero interest in actually being a public company CEO.
"Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%," Sam Altman said on the "Big Technology Podcast." "Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it'd be really annoying."
It's refreshingly honest, if not exactly the rallying cry you'd expect from someone contemplating one of the biggest IPOs in history. Altman told host Alex Kantrowitz that while public markets can create value, the day-to-day reality of running a public company comes with trade-offs that don't exactly thrill him.
The Trillion-Dollar Question
OpenAI hasn't filed for an IPO yet, but the valuation chatter has reached fever pitch. Internal estimates have climbed as high as $1 trillion, according to The Wall Street Journal last month. CFO Sarah Friar is reportedly targeting a 2027 listing, with a possible IPO filing in late 2026, Reuters reported in October.
When pressed on the podcast, Altman said he doesn't know whether OpenAI would go public in the near term and declined to discuss fundraising plans or specific valuation numbers. But if those figures hold, we're talking about one of the most valuable private companies ever to consider going public.
Why Go Public When Private Is So Nice?
"It's wonderful to be a private company," Altman acknowledged on the podcast. "We need lots of capital. We're going to cross all of the shareholder limits and stuff at some point."
Translation: OpenAI's growth appetite is massive, and at some point the math just forces your hand. There are only so many private investors you can squeeze into the cap table before regulatory requirements push you toward public markets anyway.
The company's evolution has been fascinating to watch. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on AI research, OpenAI later created a capped-profit arm to attract serious investment. Then in October, it completed a major recapitalization that restructured its commercial business as a public benefit corporation. The nonprofit parent, the OpenAI Foundation, still retains governance control and holds an equity stake valued at roughly $130 billion.
That October restructuring also changed OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft (MSFT), reducing the tech giant's ownership to about 27% and updating the terms around governance, intellectual property, and their cloud partnership.
Code Red Culture
Meanwhile, competition keeps heating up. According to an internal memo first reported by The Information, Altman declared a "code red" after Google rolled out its Gemini 3 model. Google deployed the large language model into Search in a single day, a speed that apparently got OpenAI's attention.
"We view those as relatively low-stakes, somewhat frequent things to do," Altman said, referring to these internal code red responses to competitive moves.
This wasn't the first time either. Earlier this year, OpenAI called a similar code red over DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup whose open-source language models grabbed attention for delivering rapidly improving performance at surprisingly low cost.
During that period, OpenAI pushed out several product updates, including its GPT-5.2 model and a new image-generation system. OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo reportedly told journalists last month that the model had been in development for months and wasn't just a panic response to competition, though the code red did free up additional resources to help ship it faster.
So there you have it: a potential trillion-dollar IPO led by a CEO who finds the prospect annoying but necessary, at a company that treats competitive threats as routine fire drills. If nothing else, it should make for some entertaining earnings calls.
