Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on a witness stand in San Francisco arguing that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman had stolen a charity. On Monday, nine California jurors told him he had simply waited too long to complain. By Wednesday, bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were reportedly putting the finishing touches on a draft prospectus that could make OpenAI the most valuable technology initial public offering in history.
The timeline is not coincidental. The verdict in Musk v. Altman removed the single largest legal obstacle standing between OpenAI and a public market debut. With Musk's claim barred by the statute of limitations, OpenAI is now free to pursue what people familiar with the matter say is a September 2026 target for filing — and a $900 billion valuation that would dwarf every tech IPO that came before it.
The Numbers That Matter
According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is looking to raise $30 billion in fresh capital as part of its pre-IPO funding round. That would give the company a war chest larger than the GDP of most countries, and a public market capitalization that places it in the same tier as Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia.
The mechanics are already in motion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been working with OpenAI on the draft prospectus for weeks, according to reporting from Benzinga and the Wall Street Journal. The goal is to have paperwork ready for a September filing — which, in IPO timelines, means the company is already deep into the quiet period.
For context, SpaceX is still expected to be the largest IPO of 2026, with a projected $80 billion offering. But OpenAI's $900 billion valuation would make it the biggest technology IPO by an order of magnitude. No software company has ever gone public at anywhere close to that scale.
Why the Musk Verdict Changed Everything
OpenAI's path to the public markets was never straightforward. The company began as a non-profit research lab, transitioned to a capped-profit structure, and has spent the past two years fighting off legal challenges from its own co-founder. Musk's lawsuit claimed that Altman and Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling OpenAI, then converted it into a for-profit entity that betrayed its original mission.
The jury disagreed — not on the facts, but on the timing. Their unanimous advisory verdict held that Musk had known about OpenAI's structural changes for years and had simply waited too long to sue. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately affirmed the decision, and Musk announced plans to appeal.
But appeals take years. And in the interim, the advisory verdict gives OpenAI something it desperately needed: legal clarity. Underwriters do not take companies public while a co-founder is alleging fraud in open court. The verdict does not end the litigation, but it reduces the near-term risk enough that Goldman and Morgan Stanley can plausibly tell institutional investors that the legal overhang is manageable.
The Race Against Anthropic
OpenAI is not the only AI lab eyeing a public market debut. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is also preparing a late-2026 listing. According to CMC Markets, both companies are racing to get out before the other — and before market conditions shift.
The timing matters because IPO windows are fragile. The AI trade has dominated the S and P 500 for the past eighteen months, but every bubble eventually finds its pin. If either company delays into 2027, they risk going public into a market that has already priced in AI exuberance — or worse, into a downturn that makes a $900 billion valuation look reckless.
Anthropic has its own advantages. The company has reportedly received pre-emptive offers at valuations between $850 billion and $900 billion, and its secondary market shares recently traded at prices that implied a $1 trillion valuation — briefly exceeding OpenAI on private markets. But OpenAI has revenue, brand recognition, and ChatGPT. In a public market debut, those matter more than technical benchmarks.
What a $900 Billion OpenAI Means for the Market
If OpenAI goes public at $900 billion, it will instantly become one of the twenty most valuable companies on Earth. It will also create a new category of risk that the market has never had to price: frontier AI risk.
Most technology IPOs involve business model risk, competition risk, or execution risk. OpenAI carries all of those, plus a category of tail risk that no public company has ever borne. The company's own research has published papers estimating significant existential risk from advanced AI systems. Its safety team has seen high-profile departures. And its pivot toward a for-profit structure — the very issue Musk sued over — raises governance questions that quarterly earnings calls will not easily answer.
Institutional investors will have to decide whether they are buying a software company or underwriting an experiment. The valuation assumes OpenAI will maintain its technical lead, scale revenue from ChatGPT subscriptions and API usage, and avoid the kind of safety incident that could crater public trust. All three assumptions are debatable.
The Microsoft Factor
No discussion of an OpenAI IPO is complete without Microsoft. The software giant has invested approximately $14 billion in OpenAI and holds exclusive cloud hosting rights, preferred equity, and a board observer seat. Satya Nadella has been openly enthusiastic about exploiting those advantages — his word, not ours — in Microsoft's own product roadmap.
Microsoft's stake creates a complicated dynamic for public market investors. On one hand, Microsoft's backing provides a revenue floor and distribution channel that no other AI startup enjoys. On the other hand, it means OpenAI's destiny is partially controlled by a competitor that could decide to build its own models, as Google did with Gemini, or acquire a rival, as it did with Inflection.
The prospectus will have to disclose these relationships in detail. And that disclosure may reveal just how dependent OpenAI is on a single customer — and how vulnerable that makes it.
What Happens Next
The next six weeks will determine whether OpenAI actually hits its September target. The company must complete its pre-IPO funding round, finalize the prospectus, file confidentially with the SEC, and begin the roadshow process. Any of those steps could slip — and in the current market, even a one-month delay could cost billions in valuation.
Musk's appeal is the known unknown. While the appeal is pending, it does not block the IPO. But if Musk wins an injunction or secures a ruling that reopens discovery, the legal overhang returns and underwriters may pull back. Musk has the resources and the motivation to make this expensive.
The broader question is whether the market will still want what OpenAI is selling by the time the stock begins trading. The company has already trained GPT-5, launched agentic products, and integrated into Microsoft's Office suite. The next generation of models — GPT-6, whatever comes after o1 — will determine whether OpenAI justifies its $900 billion price tag or becomes the most expensive example of AI hype ever sold to retail investors.
For now, the bankers are drafting, the lawyers are filing, and the countdown to September has begun. The only person who might still stop it is the same person who just spent three weeks in court trying to tear it down — and who, for now, has run out of time.