in this episode I explain the numbers that require SoftBank to keep OpenAI alive past all reason: they’re spending real money to achieve imaginary private equity valuations and this was enough to make their stock go up. So they can’t stop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTYxEVRiCvM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250827-softbank-needs-openai-to-stay-alive-no-matter-what - podcast
surely this long line of suckers has to end somewhere
OpenAI lasts as long as Masayoshi Son can scam Saudi Arabia. Suddenly my 2027 thesis looks more solid. Fuck.
I mean, I’m down for scamming Saudis. Woo! Let’s go ai!
I mean, they sell oil to make money to give to ai companies to burn oil.
Not a great loop to have on repeat.
Besides, there’s better things to scam the Saudis with. Like getting them to put money into Newcastle United, an investment which earned us our first domestic trophy since 1955 and earned the club a whole lot of money in general.
i think that mbs got wiser than that at this point and doesn’t put oil money in softbank anymore. saudi money is in vision fund 1 (2017; 45% of it; another 15% is emirati money); i don’t think that vision fund 2 has any after they got burned on wework, wirecard, ftx, and so on and so on. per last ed zitron post, most of softbank funding round for openai is not from them but instead from some other investors, whoever they might be, so there clearly is someone further down the line. (initial 10b, of which 7.5b from softbank and 2.5 from others; then if it converts to for-profit another 30b, but if it doesn’t, it’s 10b (?), of which 8.3b is from other investors, and 1.7b from softbank (either the numbers are wrong or ed accidentally a 1b dollars), but i don’t believe that openai will convert, so it’s 9.2b from softbank and 10.8 from others, +20b from softbank otherwise)