The $39 billion number is wrong, or at least, it’s the wrong number to watch.
Leaked audited financials reported independently by journalist Ed Zitron and confirmed by the Financial Times show OpenAI spent approximately $34 billion in FY2025 while generating roughly $13 billion in revenue. The net loss of approximately $39 billion looks alarming until you read the footnote: about $30 billion of that figure is a one-time, non-cash accounting charge tied to OpenAI’s restructuring from a nonprofit-controlled entity to a public benefit corporation. Remove that entry and the operational loss is approximately $8 billion.
That distinction matters enormously for anyone pricing the IPO.
Spend breaks down cleanly. According to the same leaked financials, about $19 billion went to research and development, 56% of total expenditure. Sales, marketing, and general administration consumed nearly $6 billion. The remaining balance covers the infrastructure and compute costs embedded in running the world’s most-trafficked AI products at scale.
Revenue grew fast. Monthly revenue reached approximately $2 billion by December 2025, up from roughly $1 billion per quarter in late 2024. That’s not linear growth, it’s an inflection. Full-year revenue of $13 billion against a $2 billion monthly exit rate suggests the back half of 2025 did the heavy lifting.
The catch is that none of these figures come from a public filing. These are non-public audited documents reported through a credible leak chain: Zitron’s Better Offline newsletter broke the story, the Financial Times independently confirmed the same figures. OpenAI hasn’t issued a press release. There’s no SEC filing with these numbers yet. The IPO S-1 will be the first time OpenAI puts its financials on public record under penalty of perjury, and these figures will either match or diverge from what’s in it.
This is the third consecutive quarter where frontier lab burn has drawn independent scrutiny ahead of a public market debut. xAI’s Q1 2026 operating loss disclosure and the broader pattern of frontier labs entering IPO pipelines simultaneously have conditioned investor expectations that large losses are normal for this category. OpenAI’s $8 billion operational loss at $13 billion revenue is a 62% operational loss margin, aggressive but not categorically different from other high-growth infrastructure companies pre-profitability.
Verification
Confirmed Ed Zitron (Better Offline) + Financial Times (independent confirmation) Source documents are non-public leaked audited financials. OpenAI has not issued a direct disclosure. S-1 filing will be the first on-record version of these figures.What to watch
OpenAI’s S-1, once public, will include audited financials on the record. If the figures diverge materially from what Zitron and the FT reported, that’s a significant credibility event. The more interesting variable is whether the $2 billion monthly revenue run-rate has held or accelerated through the first half of 2026. Revenue trajectory is the only number that makes the valuation math work at any price above $500 billion.
TJS synthesis: The real story isn’t the loss, it’s the gap between $8 billion in operational losses and $2 billion in monthly revenue. If that run rate held through Q1 2026, OpenAI’s annualized revenue is approaching $24 billion against $8 billion in operational burn. That’s a different company than the $39 billion net loss headline describes. Watch the S-1 for whether the monthly revenue figure has continued climbing. That’s the number the IPO valuation hinges on.