The Cynic’s Guide to OpenAI’s Megaround

Sam Altman should organize a celebration dinner for the men behind the largest venture capital funding round ever. I’d love to overhear SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son give advice to Thrive’s Joshua Kushner on how to avoid giving too much money to charismatic tech founders. Imagine seeing Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella fight over the dinner check to thank Altman for creating the product that boosted their own companies’ fortunes. Tiger Global Management’s Chase Coleman and Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner could also swap war stories over the last, pre–artificial intelligence startup bubble.

Ribbing aside, it is a celebratory moment for OpenAI, which now gets $6.6 billion to spend on researchers, engineers and servers, making competition a little tougher for Google, Meta Platforms, xAI and Anthropic. Altman and OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, whom I profiled today, got the round done in fairly short order, even as key staff were leaving. That makes it another fundraising coup for two of tech’s best salespeople.