According to reports, Openai is At a valuation of around $500 billion, that figure will make it the world’s most valuable private company – Bigger than Tiktok’s parent company BYTEDANCE, and even public giant Spacex, like Palantir. This is a stunning number for companies with “astronomical burn rate”. How is this possible?
As Axios reports, there are actually two deals: a round led by SoftBank valuation of the company for $300 billion, which won’t close until the end of the year, while a second-time sales of employee stocks are much higher. Most cheap stocks have been snapped up, leaving investors to fight higher-priced stocks.
An open investor (on the condition of anonymity) associates it with the dawn of the internet. “We are one of the biggest technological changes [in history],” the investor told me. “The results are still bigger than people think. ”
Investors believe that investing math at a valuation of $500 billion is straightforward: Assuming that if Chatgpt holds 2 billion users and profits at $5 a month, then “a tax rate like Google or Facebook is half the rate,” which is $120 billion in annual revenue.
“That alone can support a trillion-dollar and half-dollar companies, which is a nice return, just considering chatgpt,” the investor said. “It doesn’t include everything else they do, everything the business stuff, everything the agent stuff and all the work they do on the hardware.”
Trillions of dollars
Admittedly, this $5 figure is math in retrospect. Today, Chatgpt has 700 million active users per week, less than 10% of whom pay for it. (Openai declined to comment on this number.) Investors’ forecasts are ambitious, and they appear to be violating threats from major players such as Google or Meta Eating Openai’s lunch. “The question of $500 million now is how much it can retain the customers it acquires while taking its cost to the point where it can actually make a profit on it [hypothetically] Arun Sundararajan, professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, said.
Betting is Openai is the next Facebook or Google. For investors who buy $500 billion, “they expect to receive more than a trillion in IPOs in two to three years, otherwise the yield would not justify the investment,” said Glenn Okun, a business professor at New York University. This will mean leaping into the top 10 most valuable listed companies in the world almost overnight. Investors say their time frame is longer than that, but “given the size of the company, of course an IPO is the smartest way.” Although investors acknowledge that yes, the company will need more than $1 trillion to make the investment worth it.
Things happened to strangers, especially for openai. In the first seven months of 2025, the company doubled its annual revenue to $12 billion, indicating that Openai’s annual revenue is about $1 billion per month. Enterprise adoption also surged by 5 million paid business users this month. Not to mention what potential advertising revenue can do to its bottom line. For investors, these are signs of a company that has gained momentum: “People don’t like things like never before because most people like to match patterns,” the investor said. “From the pace of revenue growth to AI technology, everything the company does is unprecedented.”
