OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

I’m not sure that’s true anymore, I think you still need the revenue, but just need attention. everything else is just whatever because you can’t predict 10 year outcomes for any business at this point with any level of confidence, and there’s nothing to compare it to other than extremely different businesses.

Ultimately it’s more of the same goal with differing levers:

Offload a massive illiquid investment onto the public so that investors make their fund

Make sure it can tread water long enough for people to forget about it so it can go through the long and slow enshittification period

After all the prime investors have liquidated and some cooling period, risk of lawsuits from activist investors drops significantly, they can ratchet up the margins, do a few years of layoffs to pump the price.

Then everyone involved is back to where they started, only the top 100 richest people put even more distance between themselves and everyone else so they can now invest in radical life extension or whatever

This reminds me of when the former CEO of Hyundai, Chung Mong-koo, went to prison for embezzlement. In just 3 years he was pardoned because the President of South Korea basically said, "we need you for the economy."

We're not even pretending that the government is in control anymore. It's just full on anarcho-capitalism on display.

This is what it looks like to me. Crazy growth numbers to bump the valuation and public interest, go public, gradually let the company shift into irrelevancy after major owners have cashed out.

The smoke and mirrors part here is that no one except the AI research community knows what the ML/AI capabilities will look like in 5 years. What that means is that the general public is probably going to eat up this IPO. Probably a better move to hedge by buying Microsoft, but whatevs.

This happened at YC and a number of other places too, he goes into situations with nothing and comes out on top despite all odds.

Is he that skilled an operator, negotiator, or manipulator or something?