You Won’t Believe How Many Zeroes OpenAI Has Now

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Oh, reader, button up your coat and clutch your wallet, for The New York Times lets slip, with trembling hands, that OpenAI has secured the modest sum of $8.3 billion, mere pocket change for a company that now boasts a valuation swollen to $300 billion—a sum so monstrous even Gogol’s own Chichikov would faint and drop a few souls in the process. And all this, months before anyone had finished their morning tea.

You ask, who are these grand patrons of the curious mechanical brain? Why, none other than Blackstone, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, and a medley of financial titans—names that roll off the tongue like loose kopecks down the steps of a cold Petersburg stairwell. Together, with a collective inflationary puff, they’ve helped OpenAI bloat up like a government official’s waistcoat after a state dinner.

OpenAI’s plan had been simple: raise $40 billion by the end of 2025, or by the time the next round of samovars went on sale. But the moment this dream was uttered aloud in March, SoftBank apparated with $30 billion (such largesse! One only wonders what’s in their tea!).

And now, with $2.5 billion collected from venture capitalists earlier in the year and this new serving of billions, OpenAI sits atop a golden hoard of $40.8 billion, their schedule left in the dust, waving goodbye from a broken-down troika. ⏩💸

The standout benefactor in this latest spree? Dragoneer Investment Group, whose $2.8 billion offering to OpenAI would surely make aforementioned Chichikov consider the purchase of not just one, but several villages, complete with both living and deceased inhabitants.

Meanwhile, revenues balloon: $3 billion fatter in the past month alone—one can only imagine subscribers standing in line like supplicants before a particularly fashionable Petersburg general—five million strong and growing.

Elsewhere, our modern-day protagonist Sam Altman juggles another grand experiment: Worldcoin (WLD), a currency for the eye (literally: iris scans, because, of course), launching in America just this May—proving that identity is worth its weight in cryptocurrency, which is to say: highly volatile and possibly imaginary. 😲💰

But, alas, the wheel of fortune spins as it will, and Worldcoin slips and slides with the rest of its crypto kin, trading at $0.987 at the moment—about as lively as a bureaucrat’s report come spring, and a whopping 52% lower than last year. Perhaps serfs and coins both are liable to vanish without warning.

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2025-08-01 21:42