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OpenAI's audited 2025 financials are out. The numbers are worse than the estimates.
Audited financials published by Ed Zitron, independently confirmed by the FT. The 42 state AGs who opened their probe now have numbers. A $1T+ S-1 is expected late July.
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JUNE 16TH, 2026 · BY JONATHAN HILDEBRANDT
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Ed Zitron published audited OpenAI financials on June 15, with the Financial Times independently confirming the figures. OpenAI booked $13.07B in revenue against $34B in total costs, a $20.92B operating loss. Net loss landed at $38.53B, inflated by a $41.55B fair-value charge from the nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion. R&D alone ($19.18B) outran the entire year’s revenue. Microsoft collected $17.2B across cost-of-revenue and R&D, per Zitron’s analysis. Why it matters. The 42 state AGs who opened their probe earlier this month now have audited numbers to work from, and a $1T-plus S-1 is reportedly due late July or August. The pitch and the books are about to meet in public.
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Firecrawl
JUNE 16TH · TOOL TO TRY
LLM-ready scraping that turns any site into clean markdown for RAG and citation pipelines — the same plumbing behind our Brave Search guide above. Try Firecrawl.
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beehiiv
JUNE 16TH · TOOL TO TRY
Newsletter platform built for growth, with referral programs and ad network baked in. Worth a look if you are wiring an email list to Claude or ChatGPT via Kit MCP. Try beehiiv.
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CustomGPT
JUNE 16TH · TOOL TO TRY
No-code GPT trained on your own docs and closed tickets — the support-bot path we compare against Zendesk AI in this week’s slate. Try CustomGPT.
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Jonathan Hildebrandt
Co-founder and primary operator of Pondero. Writes the Pondero Brief.
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