Audited documents show revenue nearly quadrupling to $13 billion — while costs climbed even faster. Here's what the numbers actually say, and why the once-planned September IPO has already slipped.
For a company that has never voluntarily opened its books to the public, OpenAI just got a very public audit — and not on its own terms.
On June 16, 2026, independent journalist Ed Zitron published what he described as OpenAI's audited 2024 and 2025 financial statements, obtained through his newsletter Where's Your Ed At. The Financial Times independently reviewed and confirmed the documents. The headline number: OpenAI lost $38.53 billion in 2025, up roughly 7.5x from the $5.09 billion it lost in 2024. OpenAI declined to comment on the figures.
The timing was pointed. The leak landed just over a week after OpenAI confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC for a stock market listing — stripping the company of the chance to frame its own numbers before they became public.
The headline figures
2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
Revenue | $3.7 billion | $13.07 billion |
Total costs & expenses | $12.48 billion | $34 billion |
Net loss attributable to OpenAI | $5.09 billion | $38.53 billion |
Revenue actually beat OpenAI's own internal target of $10 billion for the year, and ChatGPT now counts more than 900 million weekly active users. But costs grew even faster than the top line: research and development spending alone hit $19.18 billion — more than the company's entire 2025 revenue — while sales and marketing spending grew more than fivefold, to $5.73 billion.
Why the net loss dwarfs the operating loss
Strip out one-time accounting items, and the 2025 picture looks somewhat less alarming. OpenAI's operating loss — revenue minus the ordinary costs of running the business — was $20.92 billion. That's a very large number, but only a little over half of the $38.53 billion headline figure.
The gap comes down to paperwork. OpenAI converted from a nonprofit-controlled structure into a public benefit corporation in October 2025, and that recapitalization triggered a $41.55 billion non-cash charge tied to changes in the fair value of convertible investor rights and warrants — an accounting entry that grows as the company's valuation rises, not an actual cash outflow.
A few outlets that tried to strip out the one-time conversion charge have pegged OpenAI's more comparable 2025 loss at closer to $8 billion — though the full accounting bridge to that figure isn't spelled out in the reporting, and the $20.92 billion operating loss above is the more solidly documented measure of the underlying business.
Zitron wasn't reassured by either number. "The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning," he wrote, adding that he wasn't sure how the company charts a path to sustainability.
Even on the more forgiving reading, OpenAI is still spending well beyond what it earns. Fortune's analysis of the same documents found the operating loss worked out to about $2.37 for every dollar of revenue in 2024 — a ratio that improved, but only to roughly $1.60, in 2025.
The Microsoft loop
The documents also show just how much of OpenAI's spending flows straight back to its biggest backer. OpenAI paid Microsoft $17.2 billion in 2025, split between R&D and compute costs (over $10.5 billion) and cost-of-revenue charges (around $6 billion) tied to running its models on Azure. Microsoft, in return, paid OpenAI just $303 million; SoftBank paid OpenAI $867 million. By year-end, OpenAI held just over $50 billion in total assets, roughly half of it in cash.
The arrangement puts Microsoft in an unusual triple role: OpenAI's largest outside investor, its primary cloud provider, and its single biggest expense line, all at once.
An IPO timeline that keeps moving
The leak arrived at a genuinely pivotal moment. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation in March 2026 — the largest private funding round on record — and a California jury dismissed a long-running lawsuit from Elon Musk that May, clearing a major legal obstacle.
On June 8, OpenAI confidentially filed a draft registration statement (an S-1) with the SEC, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley reportedly leading the process toward what analysts expected could be one of the largest stock offerings in history, potentially valuing the company as high as $1 trillion. Announcing the filing, OpenAI struck a resigned tone: "We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it."
That prediction proved accurate within days. But the September 2026 listing target that circulated over the summer has since slipped. By late August, OpenAI's CFO, Sarah Friar, told employees at an all-hands meeting that the company now expects to become a public company in 2027, sooner only if the business "continues to inflect."
She backed that up with fresher numbers: a revenue run rate up 35% quarter-over-quarter, enterprise revenue (which has now overtaken consumer revenue) up 50%, and second-quarter revenue of $6.7 billion, putting the annualized run rate above $40 billion — roughly double where it stood at the end of 2025. As of this writing, OpenAI still hasn't disclosed a confirmed IPO date, ticker, exchange, or offering size.
The bigger question
Strip away the accounting noise, and OpenAI's 2025 tells a fairly simple story: a business growing revenue at an extraordinary clip while spending even faster to sustain that growth. Investor materials reviewed alongside the leaked documents reportedly show OpenAI has pledged roughly $600 billion toward AI infrastructure through 2030 — coincidentally around the same year some analysts don't expect the company to turn a profit. Whenever the IPO actually arrives, it will ask public markets to underwrite the next stage of that bet, this time with OpenAI's full financial picture out in the open, whether the company wanted it there or not.
Sources: Quartz · Where's Your Ed At · Fortune · OpenAI · CNBC
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