OpenAI’s Financials Leaked — The Losses Are Staggering

**Ed Elson** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from Odoo.
Running a business takes everything you've got, and a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier, just aren't great at talking to each other. And that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on.
Enough of that. Now there is Odoo, the all-in-one fully integrated platform that might actually help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free, at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
With Fin, we've built the number one AI agent for customer service. It solves up to 90% of queries for businesses, tops all the performance benchmarks on the G2 leaderboard, and it comes with a million dollar guarantee. Check it out at fin.ai.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you?
Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:39)
If money is evil, then that building is hell.

**Ed Elson** (1:48)
Welcome to Prof G Markets, I'm Ed Elson. It is June 17th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ declined as chip stock sold off. Meanwhile, the Dow hit another all time high. Brent crude fell lower. The yield on 10-year treasury slid ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision due this afternoon. On Couchly, the odds that the Fed holds rates steady are at 99 percent. And finally, SpaceX stock popped another 15 percent early in the day. Before paring back most of those gains, it is now roughly as valuable as Amazon. More on that later.
Okay.
What else is happening? OpenAI's financials were just leaked and the numbers are wild. The company hit 13 billion dollars in revenue last year, up more than 250 percent from 2024 But the number that has everyone talking is how much OpenAI lost last year. The answer, 39 billion dollars. Meanwhile, the company has just filed to IPO and plans to go public later this year, which begs the obvious question, is this kind of spending sustainable? So to dig into these numbers, we are speaking with the man who actually broke this news, the guy who found the financials, and that is Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At Newsletter and host of the Better Offline Podcast. Ed, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining us once again. I know you've had a busy day because you literally just reported these financials. I'm not going to ask how you got your hands on them, but what I do know is it's been independently verified, audited by the Financial Times. These are real numbers. You found these numbers.
Take us through them. What should we know about these financials?

**Ed Zitron** (3:45)
So last year, OpenAI spent about $34 billion to make about $13.01, sorry, $07 billion. And it had about $22 billion in cash at the end of the year. Lost about $21 billion. That $38-$39 billion number is what I would describe as gap voodoo. There is some very strange stuff, and I'll be going into this in future episodes, going on in the balance sheet and everything with this company. They turned from a non-profit to a for-profit, though they've remained profitless, last year, which means that they have their net loss is quite strange. It's like $38.5 billion, but the number I like to come back to is they lost $21 billion from operations, and they spent astronomical amounts on sales and marketing. They spent $7.5 billion on cost of revenue, $19.18 billion in R&D, but that sales and marketing cost, that $5.73 billion is one I really like to hammer on because, what?
It's just like, excuse me, how much did you spend? Because the thing is here, there could be, I think that there's a potential that that could be partly passed through to Microsoft for the revenue share. I truly don't know. This is just me guessing. But nevertheless, that's an extreme cost. But another thing to know is $867 million. So about 6.6 percent of OpenAI's revenue last year came from Softbank. Now, I truly don't know what that's for. They have a thing called Crystal Intelligence. I'm not kidding. It's actually called that, spelled the same way too.