OpenAI Announces $122 Billion Additional ‘Committed Capital’, and Announces Their ‘Superapp’ Plan for the Future

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog:

Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.

For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range:

	Market Cap	2025 Net Income
Berkshire Hathaway	$1,028 B	$67 B
Walmart	$980 B	$22 B
Samsung	$855 B	$29 B
Eli Lilly	$832 B	$21 B

These four companies, as of today, rank 11–14th on the list of largest companies by market cap.

In a post last week, I quoted a Deutsche Bank projection estimating that OpenAI is going to lose $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. OpenAI’s refutation of this estimate is that no, they’re merely going to lose $111 billion in that timeframe. Even in the company’s own optimistic scenario, they’re going to lose, on average, as much money per year as any of these companies earn. (Well, except for Berkshire, which earned significantly more than the others last year.)

I’m not trying to be thick here. Obviously the idea behind OpenAI’s astronomical valuation is that at some point they’ll stop losing money, and then, presumably starting at some point in the 2030s, they’re going to start generating mountains of profit. P/E ratios are not effective for evaluating a startup in hyper-growth phase, but the idea is that eventually a successful startup will achieve a balanced P/E ratio. That seems possible for OpenAI. It also seems far, if not very far, from certain. My gut feeling, now more than ever, is that it is unlikely to happen, and that the most likely scenario is that the entire company goes into history alongside companies like Enron. They’re generating steadily increasing revenue now, yes, but by selling dollars of compute for pennies. First CityWide Change Bank had a better business strategy than that — they gave you the correct change.¹

I purposely stretched the valuation range in my table above into the $1T market cap range so I could include Berkshire Hathaway, a company I’ve always greatly admired. Warren Buffett has long promoted the idea of seeking to invest in companies not just with moats, but with defensible moats. I still haven’t seen a good refutation of the leaked internal Google white paper whose actual title was “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. What Google does have are highly profitable existing products and services.

Back to OpenAI’s funding announcement, skipping over the next 1,111 words, all of which struck me as meaningless blather (and, if I had to bet, largely written by ChatGPT):

That is why we are building a unified AI superapp. As models become more capable, the limiting factor shifts from intelligence to usability. Users do not want disconnected tools. They want a single system that can understand intent, take action, and operate across applications, data, and workflows. Our superapp will bring together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and our broader agentic capabilities into one agent-first experience.

This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy.

This is not “product simplification” at all. This is production complication. Web browsers are incredibly complex apps. OpenAI’s web browser — Atlas — is a failure. No one uses it. And they think they’re going to simplify things by cramming Atlas — an unpopular web browser almost no one has heard of — together with their chatbot and developer tool? Would it strike you as a simplification, or a sign of product design depravity, if Apple announced that it was merging Safari and Messages into one “superapp”? Focused, discrete apps are the best proven way to manage complexity.

Maybe merging all their apps into one will work out for OpenAI. But even if it does, it won’t be simpler. Microsoft Outlook is an email client and calendar app crammed together, and it has tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of users. But no one calls it “product simplification”. OpenAI’s “superapp” strategy reads to me like a company that is in a panic. And in that panic, they might be poised to eradicate the product focus that their current users like about ChatGPT in the first place.

Shuffling

And that’s just my read from before their late-Friday news dump of executive leadership shuffling. Hayden Field at The Verge reports (gift link):

OpenAI is undergoing another round of C-suite changes, according to an internal memo viewed by The Verge.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment — who was until recently the company’s CEO of applications — says in the memo that she will be stepping away on medical leave “for the next several weeks” due to a neuroimmune condition. While she’s out, OpenAI president Greg Brockman will be in charge of product, including leading OpenAI’s “superapp” efforts. On the business side, CSO Jason Kwon, CFO Sarah Friar, and CRO Denise Dresser will take charge.

The Verge runs Simo’s full memo at the bottom of their story, if you want to read it yourself. Simo’s title used to be CEO of applications, now it’s CEO of AGI deployment, but the last thing she oversaw before departing on an open-ended medical leave was ... checks notes ... negotiating the acquisition of a YouTube tech news show for “low hundreds of millions of dollars” (per the Financial Times). That’s the deployment of something, but not artificial general intelligence.

Simo, too, is credited with the “superapp” strategy (which I will not stop putting in dick quotes). It certainly sounds like something someone from Facebook would think up. But now she’s not going to be there to oversee it. I wish Simo well with her health issues, which seem significant, but none of this paints a picture of a well-run company with any sort of cohesive strategic vision.

Until last week, I hadn’t seen Zoë Schiffer’s profile of Simo for Wired from November, soon after she joined OpenAI as a CEO, but not the CEO:

Simo hasn’t been seen much at OpenAI’s San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company — not least because she’s heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. So for now, she’s working from home in Los Angeles, and she’s on Slack. A lot.

“Being present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within five minutes, people feel like I’m there and that they can reach me immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes,” she tells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI’s famously Slack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires. But not, apparently, for Simo. Employees say she is often seen popping into channels and threads, sharing thoughts and asking questions.

OpenAI’s work environment seems not merely overwhelming, but torturous. I have no reason to believe Simo’s medical leave is anything but a legitimate medical leave, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she never comes back. (What’s the point of being CEO of AGI deployment when there is no AGI to deploy?)

I don’t see the path from here to there, where there is a justification for a trillion-dollar-ish valuation for this company.