OpenAI Lost Two Execs in a Week. At Least Revenue Hit $40 Billion. – Moby COMMENTARY
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You know that saying, “never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home and never, never be both.”
We don’t think OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has ever heard that.
Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who has been with OpenAI for only eight months, this week announced on LinkedIn that she was leaving the company to “pursue other opportunities.”
Just a few months ago, in April, Dresser told CNBC regarding OpenAI’s enterprise customers,:”I just have never seen this level of conviction spread so quickly and consistently within the industries.”
OpenAI moved fast on a replacement, appointing Dali Rajic to the role. Rajic comes from Wiz, where he was president and COO.
But it begs the question, what happened between April and now?
And just two days before Dresser’s departure, OpenAI executive Brad Lightcap also announced his “bittersweet” departure to “start something new.” He had been with the company since 2018.
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To break it down: two execs in two major roles in apparently the most powerful AI company in the world suddenly decided to exit stage left at the same time Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is “on track” to generate annual recurring revenue north of $40 billion.
President Greg Brockman is doing his best to keep the OpenAI ship from mutiny. In an internal Slack message shared with CNBC (always a good sign), Brockman told employees its run-rate revenue saw a 20% month-over-month uptick in July, “including 32% growth for business customers.”. According to another source who spoke with Axios, everyone leaving is being posited as a “long-overdue clearing of underperforming leadership.”
So, their leadership is “underperforming,” while their internal numbers are better than they ever have been? Curious.
Beyond that, OpenAI postponed its IPO while their chief competitor, Anthropic, is beating the ChatGPT-maker on mid-year revenue and has a tentative IPO date set for October. Anthropic says it should do more than $69 billion of ARR in 2026.
In the game of circular financing everyone knows we’re trapped in, OpenAI is the load-bearing Jenga block. Aiming for a trillion-dollar-plus valuation, the company shows no viable sign it’s worth that. Then again, people said the same thing about SpaceX, but they have Elon, who carries his own laws of gravity.
That is bad news for employees, worse for anyone who hitched their wagon to Altman, and potentially existential for the cloud giants holding its purchase commitments.
It also might hit Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest partner, right where it hurts.