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Can someone explain to me why California would believe Sam Altman plans to stay in California? This is a weak handshake agreement that could easily be flipped post IPO. The very flip from non-profit to IPO shows he will do what it takes for OpenAI to "succeed", so why would the geographical location be any more permanent than corporate structure. This isnt a diss to Sam either, it just shows he is motivated by whatever is best for the entity at any given time.

They might stay in California, but that probably has far more to do with available researchers and employee preferences than some agreement with the Attorney General.

IPO is to leave someone holding the bag, right? The narrative has really changed from AGI, the most consequential technology, blabla. If I had that I would keep it private. If I wanted to cash out, I’d do an IPO. Is there a narrative that doesn’t make it seem like pump and dump?

Copy of the Memorandum of Understanding between California and OpenAI: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Final...

Targeting 1 trillion valuation

TFA:

> OpenAI had spent months making the case that it was the economic heart of the California economy—and would be willing to leave if Bonta blocked its plan to convert to a simpler corporate structure.

https://x.com/sama/status/1983223056668746218:

> California is my home, and I love it here, and when I talked to Attorney General Bonta two weeks ago I made clear that we were not going to do what those other companies do and threaten to leave if sued.

Hmmm...

If this happened any non-western country headlines would say "corruption".

Interesting - this reminds me a lot of the story with Cisco: for decades they remained a California C-Corp while many other companies reincorporated in Delaware. I once heard a lawyer say “all my clients are Delaware C-Corps except Cisco, and their reason is political.”

Eventually Cisco did indeed buckle in 2021 and reincorporate in Delaware . . .

How can a non-profit IPO? I know that technically OpenAI is a for-profit company that is owned by a non-profit, but I still don't get it.

I don’t understand the animus towards OAI going public. ChatGPT undoubtedly changed the world. The non->for profit status of the company is not impacting anyone. It’s not like their success was made possible by being a non-profit.

Suddenly everyone here is very very concerned with the classification of this corporate entity, and I detect people feel personally slighted. Why is that?

One angle I haven’t seen much here: governance isn’t just “where is HQ?”—it’s who sets the operational guardrails when commercial pressure collides with model risk. A PBC charter can, in theory, encode non-financial priorities, but practically you need hard mechanisms: an independent red-team budget with board visibility, publish-and-freeze safety commitments that can’t be quietly walked back in the S-1, and a binding incident disclosure policy (think SOC-style) for model regressions and abuse vectors.

If California wanted durable leverage beyond a “we’ll stay” letter, they could have tied approval to these process-level controls with measurable KPIs (eval transparency, red-team scope, postmortem SLAs). That would make the social license less about geography and more about demonstrable stewardship. Curious if anyone spotted language in the MoU that bites at this level rather than just the incorporation mechanics.

Prediction for the future: OpenAI IPO's lots of money changes hands, it chugs along for a while, hits a hard spot and then is taken private for pennies on the dollar by Microsoft.

Cali could have called his bluff, he's not moving to Texas any time soon, and neither are his employees.

The IPO of a 'non-profit'. Such a beautiful thing.

This is kind of a wild story. Sam Altman is openly flexing that he was able to skirt the rules and regulations by threatening economic damage to California. It's not even subtle anymore.

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.

Question: what does this mean for trust in any non profit structure if it’s this easy to convert? Why would investors put money in something they will get no returns on, but that the operators can at anytime turn into profits for themselves?

CA needs the UHNW taxpayers lol

It used to be that you could find an IPO underwriter after 100M in revenue and growing YoY above others in the competitive basket.

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

Staying in California doesn't mean it will keep employees in California. Prepare for the great offshoring.

Where else would OpenAI move to? Texas? Florida?

Good to see California coming to its senses after years of fever dreams. Disparaging their tech blessings and holding their biggest revenue source in contempt out of jealousy was a losing strategy. Hopefully those people are marginalized more and more and we can again celebrate technology innovation and the vast wealth and prosperity it brings millions of people.

OpenAi managed to keep Microsoft as major shareholder. Looking at the speed of growth Nvidia and friends are growing, OpenAI is 1 click far to IPO and one more click to 10x after IPO then finally buy Nvidia when GPU market cools down.

Just sayin...

Is it possible for a poor fool retail investor to invest in OAI