When good money goes bad: the question SpaceX and OpenAI investors aren’t asking
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When Sam Altman was president of Y Combinator, he advised founders: stay close enough to profitability that you could get there before your next funding round if you had to.
Key facts
OpenAI’s S-1 reportedly projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 alone
Now the S-1 describes orbital AI compute satellites by 2028
Going public at a $1 trillion valuation is, almost by definition, accepting money that must be impatient for growth
Christensen and his collaborator Michael Raynor developed the “ Good Money/Bad Money ” theory for exactly this scenario
Summary
Their late Harvard colleague Clayton Christensen would have recognized immediately some of the hallmarks of good money thinking: keep costs low, test whether real customers will pay real prices, don’t let your cost structure outrun your revenue model. OpenAI’s S-1 reportedly projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 alone. Profitability is not expected until 2030 at the earliest. The question none of these roadshows will answer is the one that matters: does this company have a viable path to profitability it could activate if it needed to? Christensen and his collaborator Michael Raynor developed the “ Good Money/Bad Money ” theory for exactly this scenario.