How On Earth Will OpenAI Hit $129 Billion in Four Years?!

I’ve been traveling for the past week, and ignoring the news as best as one can while on the road. But when The Information posted this doozy of a story – OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain – I made a note to myself: Grok those numbers, and see what on earth is going on.

By the time I got home, Ed Zitron, currently the tech world’s most fervid antagonist – had beat me to it. Zitron dissembled The Information’s reporting, noting that the piece takes “great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says as perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no sense.”

So what doesn’t make sense? Well first off, the numbers themselves. OpenAI earned less than $4 billion in revenue in 2024. The report, sourced from anonymous “potential and current investors,” claims OpenAI is projecting 2029 revenues to be $129 billion – an increase of $125 billion in just five years. That’s a more than 100% annual compounded growth rate – for five years in a row. Calling such a projection optimistic is a disservice to the word optimistic. It’s fantasy, and Zitron rightly skewers The Information for accepting the numbers without so much as a reality check from anyone who might have the experience to provide context.

Take Google, which was the fastest growing tech company of its time, and emblematic of a dramatic shift in Internet business overall. Back in 2003, the year before the company went public, the company earned nearly $1.5 billion in revenue. Five years later, the company had grown at an annual rate of more than 70% – to more than $21 billion in revenue.  That’s extraordinary – but it’s not close to what OpenAI and The Information is reporting.

How about Facebook? Well, the year before it went public, it earned $3.7 billion in revenue, close to what OpenAI earned in 2024. Five years later, its revenues had increased to more than $26 billion – a nearly 50% annual growth rate. Again, historic, but less than half of the history OpenAI claims to be making.

OK, what about Apple, during its fastest era of growth – from 2003 through 2008, after the launch of the iPhone? Apple grew from $6.2 billion to $32.5 billion in those heady times, impressive, but…that’s only a 39% annual growth rate.

I could go on, but finding examples of paradigm-shifting technology companies that grow at double digits (or more) over an extended period of time is beyond difficult – it’s impossible. Not to mention, the only way OpenAI gets to these eye-popping growth rates is to adopt advertising – the very business model it’s said to eschew.

So, if we’re to believe OpenAI, and by extension, The Information as a credible source of journalism, we’d have to ignore history, pop the red pill, and suspend disbelief. It seems investors in OpenAI are willing to do just that.

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