OpenAI may be building up to one of the largest initial public offerings ever, but CEO Sam Altman is not necessarily looking forward to helming a public company.
“Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%,” Altman said in an episode of the Big Technology Podcast published in December 2025. “Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying.”
This month, OpenAI filed preliminary confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for an imminent IPO. It comes amid a blitz of announcements from tech companies taking leaps to go public, including rival Anthropic, which announced its own plans for a fall IPO the week before OpenAI’s filing. SpaceX is wrapping up its first week on the public stock market, having seen its market capitalization skyrocket above $2.5 trillion, surpassing Amazon.
The ChatGPT-maker was blunt about its decision to go public, saying in a statement it announced the filing because “we expect it to leak.”
“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the statement said. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
