Sam Altman is facing off against Elon Musk in court this week.
Back at OpenAI headquarters, Altman may have a more surprising foe: his chief financial officer.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is worried that OpenAI may not have enough money to cover its enormous computing costs ahead of a planned IPO. She’s also worried about the IPO timing, the WSJ reports: “In recent months, Friar has also expressed reservations about OpenAI’s plans to go public by the end of this year, according to people familiar with the matter.”
That may sound familiar: Earlier this month, The Information reported that Friar had been frozen out of some key meetings, and had “told some colleagues earlier this year that she didn’t believe the company would be ready to go public in 2026.”
And in February, The New York Times reported that “some OpenAI executives were surprised when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was aiming to go public as soon as December, two people familiar with the company’s internal discussions said. Their main reason for concern was their belief that the company wasn’t ready.”
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The Times story doesn’t identify who the concerned executives are. But I would not be surprised if one of them was Friar.
To spell this out: Shepherding OpenAI through a mammoth IPO — likely at a valuation of more than $1 trillion — is the core job for the company’s CFO. If she and her CEO aren’t aligned — and are so far out of alignment that reporters keep hearing about it — that makes the job way harder.
Earlier this month, when I noted The Information’s piece about a rift between Friar and Altman (which happened to run shortly before The New Yorker’s withering profile of Altman), OpenAI sent me this statement, attributed to both of them:
We are fully aligned that durable access to compute is at the core of OpenAI’s strategy and a key differentiator as we scale. We have both been directly involved in every consequential compute decision over the past year plus. The $122 billion round locks in the capacity to scale compute aggressively and positions us to become the core infrastructure layer for AI, translating that advantage into sustained leadership across research and products, and making it possible for people around the world and businesses, big and small, to just build things.
On Tuesday, the company sent me this statement, also attributed to the pair, in response to the WSJ story: “This is ridiculous. We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day.“
Is it possible that multiple outlets are getting this wrong? That Friar and Altman really are synced up, and that any stories you’re hearing otherwise are just the inevitable byproduct you get from a young, huge, and fast-growing company barreling into the future? Could be!
And does it really matter if there’s behind-the-scenes stuff happening in advance of an IPO? After all, investors would be buying the story of what OpenAI could be, not whatever it is in the moment.
And if you want to get really generous, you can point out that you can even screw up your IPO and no one will care if your company succeeds in the end. Which is why you probably don’t remember that Facebook’s 2012 IPO was considered a scandalous disaster at the time.
All that said: If I were getting ready to launch a trillion-dollar IPO in a few months, I’d want to make sure my most important executives were on board with my plan. And if they weren’t, I’d certainly ask them to keep quiet about it.
