The courtroom was hushed as Elon Musk took the stand, and for a few seconds the story bent around a single image: a tech titan accusing another. I felt the room tilt toward spectacle. You’d expect that to be Sam Altman’s worst moment of the day — it wasn’t.
I cover deals, board fights, and the kind of investor panic that rearranges balance sheets. Let me walk you through what actually shook the markets today, why the WSJ report matters more than the courtroom drama, and what you should be watching as OpenAI heads toward a presumed IPO.
Markets sold first, questions followed
Stocks linked to OpenAI slid across the board on Tuesday — shares of Oracle and CoreWeave plunged after the story hit. When investors start dumping companies with known ties to a single private buyer, fear spreads faster than any press release.
That sell-off was the most visible reaction: cloud vendors, GPU sellers and chipmakers with big OpenAI contracts saw share prices drop. CoreWeave had to put out a statement reminding markets that OpenAI is “a terrific partner, but not our only one.” Oracle’s rout felt less reassuring. The day made clear that financial exposure to one startup can look like concentrated risk on a public balance sheet.
Did OpenAI miss its revenue and user targets?
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI failed to hit its internal goals — notably, the one billion weekly active users target — and missed revenue forecasts late last year. The WSJ also said CFO Sarah Friar was worried OpenAI couldn’t sustain its computing commitments. OpenAI pushed back, claiming breakout Codex growth, enterprise deals across clouds, and “the only consumer app that matters.”
A boardroom tug-of-war revealed in memos and leaks
People inside the company started whispering when executives began arguing over spending versus capacity. That’s where the leaks originated.
According to multiple reports — the WSJ, The Information, and a New Yorker investigation — Altman and Friar were at odds. Friar allegedly questioned whether revenue growth could support a multiyear spending plan that includes roughly $600 billion (≈€552B) in projected commitments, with the company expected to burn more than $200 billion (≈€184B) before turning a profit. Those numbers read like a high-wire act without a safety net.
How did competitors like Google Gemini and Anthropic affect ChatGPT’s growth?
Late last year, Google’s Gemini and later Anthropic’s agentic releases — Claude Code and Claude Cowork — carved into ChatGPT’s momentum. The WSJ says Gemini ate into ChatGPT’s market share and that OpenAI missed monthly revenue targets in 2026 as Anthropic captured enterprise and coding customers. Competitive pressure forced OpenAI to pivot product and pricing strategies while still racing to secure compute.
Compute deals created a Venn diagram of risk
OpenAI signed multibillion-dollar deals with hyperscalers and GPU suppliers that became the industry’s central storyline.
The collapse of a reported $100 billion (≈€92B) Nvidia deal raised eyebrows and revived talk of circular dealmaking — a network of agreements where vendors prop each other’s valuations and cash flows. That arrangement can behave like a slow leak in a dam: the big numbers mask how fragile the structure is if one party underdelivers. When a major counterparty stumbles, the ripple effects can sweep across suppliers, customers, and market sentiment.
Cost cuts, ads, and the run-up to an IPO
OpenAI is reportedly trimming projects such as its video generator Sora and experimenting with revenue levers like ads inside ChatGPT.
Those moves are signals to investors: reduce burn and monetize the consumer footprint. But they also bind OpenAI to short-term optics. The Information’s reporting that Friar doubted revenue would justify five years of promised spending makes any IPO narrative fragile. If the numbers arriving at the S-1 don’t convince the market that this cash burn translates to scale, public investors will punish valuation hard — and quickly.
Is OpenAI preparing for an IPO this year?
OpenAI has taken steps consistent with an IPO path: cost pruning, enterprise pushes, and messaging about product growth. Yet internal friction — board questions about Altman’s push for more compute and reports of missed targets — complicates that path. Timing will depend on whether the company can stabilize growth, close enterprise deals with hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google, and reassure big suppliers such as Nvidia and cloud partners like Oracle.
Why this matters to the industry and to you
Investors and executives have already shifted billions into datacenters and GPUs because everyone assumed the demand curve for AI would rise without pause. Now that assumption is being stress-tested.
If OpenAI’s growth has slowed, the damage is wider than one private firm’s headline; it questions an entire financing model that has tilted public markets toward massive, concentrated bets. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google are about to report earnings, and Nvidia’s messaging has already spent quarters promising that revenue will eventually follow capital expenditures. The market’s reaction today suggests that promise is being auditioned under brighter lights.
You don’t need to be inside those boards to feel the impact: vendors may tighten terms, partners may diversify, and startups that looked to OpenAI as a distribution engine could find doors closing. The company says it’s firing on all cylinders; skeptics say the runway is shorter than the press release implies.
So where does Altman stand after Musk’s courtroom hour and the WSJ’s report? He still controls the product, strategy and narrative, but the scaffolding around OpenAI has cracks: competing models, skeptical boards, and public markets that hate concentrated counterparty risk. If you were advising a public company, would you stake 40–50% of cloud commitments on one private buyer right now?