Altman won't go public for less than $1 trillion, so OpenAI's IPO may slip to 2027

Advisors are telling OpenAI to hold off on going public until next year. The triggers: volatile tech markets and SpaceX's weak stock performance after its record IPO. SoftBank, one of OpenAI's biggest backers, lost 13 percent in a single day.

OpenAI is leaning toward delaying its IPO to 2027. That's according to the New York Times, citing three people involved in the discussions. The company had originally targeted the third or fourth quarter of 2026 and had already hired bankers and lawyers.

CEO Sam Altman is pushing for a $1 trillion valuation, up from the company's last private valuation of $730 billion, the sources say. That demand appears to be the main reason for the delay. Advisors gave Altman two options, according to the NYT: go public in 2027 at the trillion-dollar price tag, or move faster with a lower valuation. Altman rejected anything below a trillion as a "nonstarter."

SpaceX's rocky debut spooked OpenAI's advisors

Rumors of a possible delay surfaced earlier. But SpaceX's recent trajectory gave advisors new ammunition, the NYT reports. Elon Musk's rocket company pulled off the largest IPO in history earlier this month, raising more than $85 billion and hitting a $1.77 trillion valuation on its first trading day. Since then, the stock has slid from a high of $202 to $153. On top of that, tech markets remain choppy as investors question whether AI companies can deliver on their lofty promises. Advisors warned OpenAI that retail investors aren't likely to show much enthusiasm right now, the NYT says.

In late 2025, CFO Sarah Friar had said the company wasn't pursuing an IPO and was focused on its finances. OpenAI then cut side projects like the video generator Sora and started building a sales team to compete with Anthropic's Claude Code through its coding product Codex.

How aggressively OpenAI is scaling its B2B business became clear in a recent conversation between THE DECODER and Arnaud Fournier, CTO of the new subsidiary DeployCo. In that interview, Fournier said the Codex coding tool now has more than four million weekly users worldwide - a fivefold increase in three months. He also pointed to massive investments in OpenAI's own compute infrastructure and described DeployCo's engineers as the mechanism for embedding models deep into enterprise workflows. Numbers like these, plus the promise of enterprise transformation, form the story Altman wants to tell investors to justify the trillion-dollar valuation.

But the financial picture remains tight. OpenAI brought in about $13 billion in revenue in 2025 and wants to triple that this year. It still isn't profitable, though, and is pouring money into data centers. ChatGPT user numbers have also stalled at around 900 million - well short of the billion mark the company had expected.

SoftBank's big bet takes a hit

The delay rumors hit Japanese mega-investor SoftBank especially hard. The company's stock fell 13 percent, its steepest drop since August 2024, Bloomberg reports. SoftBank's investment in OpenAI is set to reach about $65 billion by October. The prospect of an IPO had recently pushed SoftBank's market cap above Toyota's.

Hiroki Takei, a strategist at Resona Holdings, told Bloomberg that an OpenAI IPO would give a transparent market price to a large chunk of SoftBank's holdings and shrink the typical conglomerate discount on SoftBank's stock. "News of an IPO delay naturally dampens those expectations," Takei said.