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> Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis It s
by cjbarber 1y ago
> Microsoft holds an investment in OpenAI Group PBC valued at approximately $135 billion, representing roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis
It seems like Microsoft stock is then the most straightforward way to invest in OpenAI pre-IPO.
This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI the most valuable private startup in the world.
Now many of the main AI companies have decent ownership by public companies or are already public.
- OpenAI -> Microsoft (27%)
- Anthropic -> Amazon (15-19% est), Alphabet/Google (14%)
Then the chip layer is largely already public: Nvidia. Plus AMD and Broadcom.
Clouds too: Oracle, Alphabet/GCP, Microsoft/Azure, CoreWeave.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pinnochio 1y agoI think it's a bit late for that. Also, you have to consider the size of Microsoft relative to its ownership of OpenAI, future dilution, and how Microsoft itself will fare in the future. If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability, any gains from its stake in OpenAI may be offset by its diminishing fortunes.
- salynchnew 1y agoYou're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.
- pinnochio 1y agoI didn't make a prediction. I was pointing out factors to be aware of. Hence the use of "If, say" to denote a hypothetical. Some people's convictions and lack of reading comprehension skills are certainly wild.
- dualityoftapirs 1y agoReminds me of how Yahoo had a valuation in the negative billions with their Alibaba holdings taken into account: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-less-than-nothing/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-says-yahoos-worth-l...
- mr_toad 1y ago> If, say, Microsoft is on a path towards decreasing relevance/marketshare/profitability That’s a big if. I see a lot of people in big enterprises who would never even consider anything other than Microsoft and Azure.
- no_wizard 1y agoC# and .NET have a bigger market share than what gets talked about in trendy circles
- jtbaker 1y agoC#/.NET are nice. Azure/Microsoft Cloud not so nice. Idk, maybe I have some bias due to familiarity, but I find the GCP admin and tools to be so much more intuitive than the Azure (and AWS too, for that matter) counterparts.
- jstummbillig 1y agoOh dear lord, GCP could be the intuitive one?! I have not used anything else but, dear lord, that's shocking and not at all surprising at the same time.
- arresin 1y agoAny speculation on why none of them can make a UI and UX that is not 100% completely shit and makes you feel miserable and stressed out? Couldn’t they just throw money at the problem? Or fire the criminals who designed it?
- xp84 1y agoAll the cloud platforms do not care about UI/UX at all. Although GCP gets honorable mention for being pretty consistent and I have to admit not too bad. But anyway none of them care because it’s expected that 90% of the usage of the platform will be via a CLI or some abstraction (k8s, terraform, etc etc). So, they put minimum effort into UI quality, usefulness, consistency, appearance. That’s my understanding anyway
- whizzter 1y agoHuh? Windows itself might have had it's heyday but MS is solidly at #2 for clouds only behind AWS with enterprise Windows shops that will be hard pressed to not use MS options if they go to the cloud (Google really has continued to fumble their cloud positions with their reputation for "killedbygoogle.com" nagging on everyones mind). The biggest real threat to MS position is the Trump administration pushing foreign customers away with stuff like shutting down the ICJ Microsoft accounts, but that'll hurt AWS and Google equally much (The winners of that will be Alibaba and other foregin providers that can't compete in full enterprise stacks today).
- ml-anon 1y agoWatch this week. Amazon cloud growth has been terrible (Google and Microsoft remains >30%). Amazon have basically no good offerings for AI which is where gcp is bringing to eat their lunch. Anthropic moving to TPU for inference is a big big signal.
- eitally 1y ago100% this. The AWS of today is going to be the Hetzner or Digital Ocean of the future. They'll still have hyperscale, but will not be seen as innovating on first party products or a leader in the AI managed services industry. And frankly, they are currently doing a shit job of even this, because Oracle is in the same category and OCI has been eating everyone's lunch (for the past two years!).
- stackskipton 1y agoIs OCI really eating everyone lunch? Sure, it's showing massive growth but that's because Oracle has been running around offering insane discounts. We were cloud shopping, and they came by as well with REALLY good discount. Luckily our CTO was massively afraid of what would happen after that discount ran out.
- makestuff 1y agoif you want to invest in open ai I think you can just buy it on NASDAQ private markets.
- yreg 1y agoNot everyone can "just buy it". Investing in MSFT is accessible to many more people than private markets.
- yousif_123123 1y agoI think the stable coin company Tether is valued at 500 billion also.
- saaaaaam 1y agoIs the company valued at $500 billion or is the sum of the digital assets they’ve collateralised worth $500 billion? Because if you buy the tokens you presumably do not own the company. And if you buy the company you hopefully don’t own the tokens - nor the assets that back the tokens.
- yousif_123123 1y agoI think I read that its valued at 500 billion based on their latest fund raise. I don't know the total holdings they have. I have no interest in crypto, just wanted to mention this which was surprising to me when I heard it.
- saaaaaam 1y agoWow, yes they claim to be raising a round valuing them at $500bn. Which is crazy given the market cap of their token is only apparently $173bn. https://www.reuters.com/business/crypto-firm-tether-eyes-500-billion-valuation-major-raise-round-bloomberg-news-2025-09-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/crypto-firm-tether-eyes-500... I struggle to see how those numbers stack up.
- saaaaaam 1y agoFor comparison Blackstone is worth ~$180bn with ~$1 trillion AUM. So somehow this crypto firm and its investor think it can get a better return than Blackstone with a fraction of the assets. Now, sure, developing market and all that. But really? If it scaled to Blackstone assets level of $1 trillion then you’d expect the platform valuation to scale, perhaps not in lockstep but at least somewhat. So with $1 trillion in collateralised crypto does that make Tether worth $1.5 trillion? I’d love someone to explain that.
- 1y ago
- outside1234 1y agoOr for the inevitable crash when we discover that OpenAI is a round tripping Enron style disaster.
- sekai 1y ago> This also confirms the $500 billion valuation making OpenAI the most valuable private startup in the world. SpaceX?
- whamlastxmas 1y agoAround $350 to $400 billion from a couple sources I saw, but it's a lot of speculation
- throwup238 1y agoIf SpaceX is still a “startup”, the word has lost all meaning.
- tguedes 1y agoIt already has. Any tech company that is pre-IPO and still raising funding rounds is a "startup". I'm surprised there hasn't been someone to come up with a separate term for the stage of these kinds of companies.
- airspresso 1y agoThat's just a privately owned tech company then. Lots of companies never IPO.
- tguedes 1y agoStill, I think there needs to be a specific term for a company that has recently had a funding round and will likely IPO in the future, like Stripe. That's a different category than a start-up or privately owned company that will never IPO like Koch Inc.
- notyourwork 1y agoIt’s odd to me in clouds you excluded AWS.
- awestroke 1y agoAnd included oracle first. OP is probably Larry
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoIn reverse order of preferential choice.
- paxys 1y agoMicrosoft is worth $4T, so if you buy one MSFT share only ~3% of that is invested in OpenAI. Even if OpenAI outperforms everyone's expectations (which at this point are already sky high), a tiny swing in some other Microsoft division will completely erase your gains.
- ivape 1y agoMarkets trade on a magical growth valuation. Nothing you said matters at all at the moment and won’t for about 5 or so years. People are going to eat shit over and over when they keep talking like this, just look at what NVDA did today. It’s not going to stop.
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago5 years is a pretty long time to predict with confidence. Definitely agree that "the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", but 5 years would be unusually long if you believe we're already in a bubble.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pllbnk 1y agoFiat currencies are becoming meme tokens at this point. I think we are in a hyperinflation era and consumer price growth will simply have to catch-up to the stock market growth rate because wealth isn't being created right now, it's just being inflated. All of those who are investing in stock market and thinking they are becoming rich might just realize that those were the paper gains when they will still not be able to afford anything with all the big numbers in their investment accounts.
- ForHackernews 1y agoYeah, but on the plus side when the AI bubble bursts at least you've still got Excel.
- ethbr1 1y ago> "Microsoft’s IP rights now exclude OpenAI’s consumer hardware." Relevant and under-appreciated. 1. OpenAI considers its consumer hardware IP serious enough to include in the agreement (and this post) 2. OpenAI thinks it's enough of a value differentiator they'd rather go alone than through MS as a hardware partner OpenAI wearable eyeglasses incoming... (audio+cellular first, AR/camera second?)