Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
The Altman Doctrine: Is OpenAI’s Velocity a Feature or a Financial Imperative?
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There appears to be a consensus forming around Sam Altman: the man moves at a velocity previously unseen in Silicon Valley. Indeed, Tech CEOs marvel — and worry — about Sam Altman's dizzying race to dominate AI. In just the past few weeks, OpenAI has launched a transformative video generator, inked computing deals reportedly totaling over a trillion dollars, and pushed further into enterprise software. The narrative is one of relentless, exponential progress.
This is the story told on the surface. But my work has taught me that when observing any high-growth entity, velocity is never a standalone metric. It is always a function of something else—either a truly revolutionary product-market fit, or, more often, a frantic race against a ticking clock. The data points emerging around OpenAI suggest the latter is a far more probable explanation for the company’s “breakneck pace.” The speed isn’t the strategy; it appears to be a symptom of a deeply precarious financial and operational model.
Let’s first establish the financial baseline. OpenAI is projected to surpass $13 billion in revenue this year. That’s an impressive figure for a young company. However, it must be viewed in context with its expenditures, which are astronomical. The company is reportedly on track to spend $155 billion through 2029, a burn rate that makes even the most extravagant dot-com era flameouts look like a rounding error. The recent flurry of dealmaking—securing compute power from Nvidia and AMD—has pushed its total commitments this year alone past the $1 trillion mark.
These are not the numbers of a company calmly executing a long-term vision. They are the numbers of an entity engaged in a full-sprint land grab. The deals with chipmakers are particularly telling. Securing compute isn't a luxury; it's an existential necessity. Altman is diversifying his suppliers, a classic "Negotiation 101" tactic to control future costs, but it’s also a defensive move against a supply chain bottleneck that could cripple the entire operation. He isn't just building a product; he's attempting to corner the market on the raw material required to run it.
I've looked at hundreds of growth-stage financial models, and the capital outlay here is an outlier of staggering proportions. The sheer scale suggests a core belief within OpenAI that it must achieve platform dominance—becoming the default infrastructure for the next generation of tech—before its colossal financial obligations come due. The revenue, while growing, shows a significant discrepancy when mapped against the forward-looking capital expenditure. The only way to close that gap is to achieve a near-monopolistic market position so entrenched that it can dictate terms and pricing. This isn't just growth; it's a highly leveraged bet on total market capture.
When a company is operating under this level of financial pressure, certain behaviors become predictable. Norms, regulations, and ethical considerations shift from being guardrails to being obstacles that can be quantified and, if necessary, ignored. The cost of compliance is weighed against the cost of delay, and delay is the single greatest threat.
We see this calculus playing out with the release of Sora 2. The model was instantly flooded with outputs that were transparently derived from copyrighted material. The public outcry was immediate, with some commentators framing the issue starkly: It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If he’s the future, can we go backwards? | Marina Hyde. From a strategic standpoint, however, this is likely irrelevant. The legal battles to come are a future problem; establishing market leadership is a present imperative. The motto isn't "beg for forgiveness rather than ask permission." A more accurate, data-driven interpretation is that potential future litigation costs have been priced into the model as a necessary, and acceptable, cost of doing business. It is cheaper to settle lawsuits in five years than it is to license content today and risk being second to market.
This logic is perfectly consistent with OpenAI’s otherwise contradictory stance on its own intellectual property. The company’s statement about Chinese AI firm DeepSeek potentially “distilling” its models was sharp and defensive. “We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology,” it read. This isn't hypocrisy. It's the rational behavior of an entity trying to build a moat. You aggressively defend your own territory while simultaneously claiming rights to undeveloped land.
The same cold calculation likely applies to safety concerns. A lawsuit alleging ChatGPT aided a user’s suicide is a tragedy, but to the operational model, it represents a manageable risk. The user base for ChatGPT has exploded, with weekly active users doubling to approximately 800 million—to be more exact, they've more than doubled in just the last four months. The negative externalities affecting a fraction of a percent of users do not, in a purely numerical sense, outweigh the strategic value of acquiring that massive user base. The risk is externalized to the public, while the benefit of the data and market share is internalized by OpenAI.
Altman’s political maneuvering also aligns with this pattern. His 2016 warnings about Donald Trump have been replaced by praise for a "pro-business, pro-innovation president" (reported after attending a White House dinner for tech titans). This isn't a change of heart; it's a change of variables. In 2016, Trump was a perceived risk to the system Altman operated within. Today, an administration hostile to regulation is a strategic asset, providing the clear runway needed to achieve escape velocity before regulatory gravity can take hold.
When you strip away the messianic language of building AGI and focus purely on the numbers and observable actions, the picture of OpenAI becomes much clearer. The dizzying speed, the blatant disregard for copyright, the tolerance for safety risks, and the political expediency are not independent variables. They are correlated symptoms of a single, overarching driver: a race to achieve irreversible market dominance before the company’s monumental burn rate and accumulating liabilities trigger a collapse. Sam Altman is not so much a visionary steering the future as he is a trader executing a massive, high-leverage, all-or-nothing trade where the potential downside is not his to bear.
