Sam Altman is getting fed up with the haters, and he wishes OpenAI were public so they could put money behind their critiques.
“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” Altman said. “I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares.”
Although not publicly traded, OpenAI’s long list of institutional backers have privately held shares in the startup. This includes Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital, which invested an undisclosed amount as part of last year’s $6.6 billion funding round that valued the company at $157 billion. OpenAI is now worth $500 billion after a secondary share sale for current and former employees last month.
Altman also said that there are “not many times” he wishes OpenAI were a public company, but he highlighted one particular benefit of having publicly traded shares.
“One of the rare times it’s appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous ‘OpenAI is about to go out of business.’ I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that,” he added.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Still, he acknowledged that the idea is to go public eventually.
“I’m a realist. I assume it will happen someday, but that was—I don’t know why people write these reports,” Altman said about the Reuters report. “We don’t have a date in mind. We don’t have a board decision to do this or anything like that. I just assume it’s where things will eventually go.”
