The Man Who Owns None of It
There is a strange detail buried in the story of the most powerful AI company on Earth, and almost nobody outside Silicon Valley knows it: Sam Altman, the man whose face has become shorthand for the entire artificial intelligence boom, does not own a single share of OpenAI.
Not one.
On May 22, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is filing confidential paperwork for an initial public offering — the legal process of selling shares of a private company to ordinary investors on the stock market — within days. The target listing is September. The valuation being whispered is up to a trillion dollars. That would make OpenAI larger than ExxonMobil, larger than Walmart, roughly the size of Berkshire Hathaway.
The timing is not an accident. Four days ago, Altman won a $134 billion lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, who has spent the last two years arguing in court that OpenAI betrayed its founding mission. Two days ago, Musk's SpaceX filed its own enormous S-1, the formal document a company submits before going public. Now Altman is racing to the same finish line.
And somewhere in the cap table — the spreadsheet that lists who owns what — there is a line for Sam Altman's personal equity that still, after a decade of building the company, simply reads "TBD."
