OpenAI Is Sinking Fast, Will It Pull the Ellisons and Trump Down With It?

But heavy spending contributed to a nearly eightfold increase in the net loss attributable to OpenAI, which soared from $5bn in 2024 to around $39bn in 2025. A person familiar with the matter said the large majority of that jump reflected a non-cash accounting charge linked to the company’s previous structure rather than its underlying operations.

Before we go back to the FT’s “person familiar with the matter”, let’s also look at some numbers from the WSJ, via Gary Marcus:

In the quarter before it hoped to list, OpenAI added a billion dollars of revenue and three billion dollars of losses. It lost roughly $1.84 for every dollar it took in — worse than the $1.22 Ed Zitron has been citing for a while.

Now back to that whisperer who talked to the Pink Lady, er the Financial Times.

The FT’s anonymous source goes on to “explain” how OpenAI’s family blogging conversion from a non-profit to a for-profit (so it could IPO at a $1 trillion valuation because it’s incredibly desperate for cash — and it’s easy to see why, that furnace needs to be fed!) forced the conversion of early investors “convertible interest rights” (ie not conventional equity) which racked up an eye-popping $41.55 billion charge.

This allegedly cuts OpenAI’s loss to “only” $8 billion — after “stripping out the charge and other non-cash expenses, such as stock-based compensation of staff and computing credits from Microsoft.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

That’s like me saying “after stripping out my excess fat, skeleton and muscular system I weigh a healthy 95 pounds.”

This financial hemorrhaging explains the executive exodus.

Thirteen, Make That Fourteen Top Execs Exit OpenAI

Business Insider has the list:

The ChatGPT maker has lost a string of senior leaders in 2026, including former operating chief Brad Lightcap, applications CEO Fidji Simo, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, and executives overseeing marketing, enterprise products, science, safety, and ethics. Some left to start new ventures, while some stepped back for health reasons.

• Chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, started December 2025, left August 2026.
• Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap, started 2018 as CFO, became COO in 2022, left August 2026.
• CEO of applications Fidji Simo, started May 2025, stepped down July 2026.
• Chief product officer, later VP of OpenAI for Science, Kevin Weil, started 2024, left April 2026.
• Head of Sora Bill Peebles, started 2023, left April 2026.
• Chief technology officer for business applications Srinivas Narayanan, started 2023, left April 2026.
• Chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, started December 2024, stepped down April 2026.
• Enterprise AI sales lead Barret Zoph, returned January 2026 after first leaving in September 2024, left June 2026.
• Head of ethics Chloé Bakalar, started August 2025, left July 2026.
• Head of safety systems Johannes Heidecke, started 2021, took charge of safety systems in 2024, left July 2026.
• Chief futurist Joshua Achiam, started 2017, left July 2026 after nearly nine years.
• Head of robotics and consumer hardware Caitlin Kalinowski, started November 2024, resigned March 2026.
• Vice president of sales for the Americas Kaylin Voss, start date not given, resigned August 2026.
• Head of data centers Chris Malone, started March 2025, left August 2026.

Chris Malone was in the Biz Insider piece but not counted, WSJ reported on his exit.

A Company About to do the Biggest IPO Ever Doesn’t Bleed Out C-Suite Talent

As Eli the Computer Guy keeps reinforcing in his video on the OpenAI meltdown this is really weird:

I hear this from some of the viewers. They’re like, “Eli, Eli, this is normal before the IPO. You’re just being melodramatic. This is clickbait.” Here’s the deal. Most of the time when you see departures before an IPO, essentially what they do is they hire adults. You will hear this in the startup technology world — the whole question of when do you bring the adults into your company. What that means is you are bringing in people that have experience running publicly traded companies. They know what is required out of a publicly traded company. They know what the investors are looking for. And so if you’re going to IPO and you have this snot-nosed college dropout that is currently the CEO, the idea is you bring in other executives, you flip the executive roles to bring in adults, to make it seem better for the whole IPO thing.

The thing that’s weird here with OpenAI is that this is a massively valuable company that has already had access to basically whoever the hell they want. Whether or not people actually understand what it is, everybody thinks they understand what artificial intelligence is. And so they should not have had a problem being able to bring in good executives. And again, the executives that are leaving, these are not kids. The chief revenue officer was not a kid. This was not some snot-nosed girl getting her master’s degree in economics that happened to get the chief revenue officer position. She was poached from Salesforce, from Slack, had spent a decade there, and she bounced out. Her subordinate, the vice president of sales for America — again, years of experience — she bounced out.

And that’s the thing to understand about this. This is not the kids being replaced by the adults. This is the adults running for the f*cking door. These are the experienced technology executives that have cut their teeth in Silicon Valley over a decade or more, looking at OpenAI and going “f*ck no,” and running away.

This should theoretically be the third most valuable IPO in US history. Even if we’re not talking about generational wealth being created, simply having that token to say “I was there” is incredibly valuable in the technology world. These guys aren’t willing to stick around five or six more months. Really? It’s weird, dude. It’s f*cking weird.

So, we’ll let that suffice for our case that OpenAI is screwed. What does it all mean?

OpenAI Might Pull Oracle Down With It

Summarizing Ed Zitron’s mid-August piece “How Much Money Does AI Need?“, OpenAI’s contractual obligations include:

• $750bn compute through 2030 (WSJ)
• $50bn compute in 2026 (OpenAI’s own figure, from the Musk trial)
• $800bn needed over three and a half years to meet all commitments (Zitron’s calculation)
• $300bn five-year Oracle deal

OpenAI and Anthropic together need to raise more than $1.1trn — they raised $217bn combined across all of 2026. (WSJ)

Zitron also reports that the Stargate Abilene project that Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, and POTUS Trump announced with such fanfare in January 2025 is behind. Way behind.

Only three of eight buildings energised and monetised, per sources with direct knowledge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Wisconsin has been even less accommodating. In July the state’s Public Service Commission tightened its credit rules for very large power users, leaving Oracle facing a $7bn collateral requirement to guarantee power for the Port Washington campus — a bill that could run north of $100m a year. The trigger was Oracle’s own credit rating: the tariff bites on developers rated below S&P A−, and S&P had just cut Oracle to BBB−. The rule exists so that ratepayers, not Oracle, aren’t left holding the bill for a data center that never gets finished.

Then in August the PSC unanimously revoked the “completeness determination” for the transmission project meant to power the site. American Transmission Company had filed or refiled 564 documents since the original sign-off, and regulators gave up trying to evaluate what they called a moving target. Chair Summer Strand said the application was “clearly underwater, nearly underwater” and that pulling the determination was “akin to tossing it a life preserver.” ATC has to start the whole application over — and neither the company nor a ratepayer watchdog can remember the commission ever doing that before.

And let’s not forget the debt that OpenAI funders like Microsoft are carrying is even bigger than reported, via the WSJ

pic.twitter.com/fhPjduAoHl

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 2, 2026

Then there’s Ed Zitron’s Hater’s Guide to Circular Financing, Part One which reports that, if OpenAI can’t make it to a public offering, Nvidia is an obvious candidate to feed it at least another $10bn. He also notes Nvidia’s $6.3bn deal to buy back unused CoreWeave compute has never been triggered — because the compute is mostly being used by OpenAI.

He also reports that Nvidia’s Q2 FY2027 revenue was over $96bn, up 106% YoY. But 70% of accounts receivable came from five customers and 44% from three, and days-sales-outstanding jumped from 45.4 to 59.6 days — Nvidia is now letting some customers pay three months to a year after delivery, booking revenue long before cash arrives. CFO Colette Kress guided to 70% revenue growth in FY28, about $674bn. The 10-Q shows $366bn in commitments and $25bn of data-centre leases not yet commenced.

It takes Zitron tens of thousands of words to explain all this crap, but I’ll just let Bloomberg do a few billions worth of work with this graphic from their “AI Circular Deals: How Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia Keep Paying Each Other””

pic.twitter.com/wxbLgeSLKH

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 2, 2026

So How Much Trouble Is Oracle In?

This much:

It’s not just that what Oracle is doing is bone stupid, it’s that the normies at CNBC noticed back in March and called it out in a brutal piece titled “Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt.”

Feel Larry Ellison’s pain:

Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger.

An Oracle spokesperson declined to comment.

It’s a logical decision for OpenAI, which doesn’t want older chips. Nvidia used to release a new generation of data center processors every two years. Now, CEO Jensen Huang has the company shipping one every year, and each generation offers a leap in capability. Vera Rubin, unveiled at CES in January and already in production, delivers five times the inference performance of Blackwell.

For the companies building frontier models, the smallest improvement in performance could equate to huge gaps in model benchmarks and rankings, which are closely followed by developers and translate directly to usage, revenue, and valuation.

That all points to a bigger problem at play. For infrastructure companies, securing a site, connecting power and standing up a facility takes 12 to 24 months at minimum. But customers want the latest and greatest, and they’re tracking the yearly chip upgrades.

Oracle’s added challenge is that it’s the only hyperscaler funding its buildout primarily with debt, to the tune of $100 billion and counting. Google, Amazon and Microsoft, by contrast, are leaning on their enormous cash-generating businesses.

Meanwhile, Oracle partner Blue Owl is declining to fund an additional facility, and (Oracle) plans to cut up to 30,000 jobs.

Oracle did cut the at least 20,000 jobs and things have only gotten worse since because they’re talking about cutting more jobs and I’m hearing rumors that the cuts were BONE deep. I’m talking critical HR, legal and billing functions are not functioning according to my sources who are Oracle clients.

I’ve shown in previous pieces how the Ellison Empire depends on OpenAI more than ever because:

And as for the Trump administration, they’ve already come down hard on Anthropic and taken the side of OpenAI, not smart when enemies are circling.

Please follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com.

Related:

• Stressed Oligarchs at Meta, OpenAI, and the Ellison Empire (August 19, 2026)
• Ellison Empire Besieged On All Fronts (July 29, 2026)
• Oracle’s Exploding Debt and Diving Stock Threaten Paramount Empire (July 22, 2026)
• Will the Trump Admin Buy Into OpenAI & Save Softbank? (July 2026)
• OpenAI, Amazon Colluding With Trump Against Anthropic (June 15, 2026)
• Has the Ellison Infotainment Empire Peaked With Paramount-WBD? (April 2026)
• Weak Links Oracle, OpenAI, UAE Are Hammered by Iran War (April 6, 2026)
• AI Subprime Crisis Both a Victim and Expression of Idiocracy (April 1, 2026)
• Mask-Off Moment for Paramount at Nexus of Global Conflict & AI (March 9, 2026)
• Larry Ellison Goes Beyond Oracle Into Military and Media (August 11, 2025)