Sam Altman is having a pretty bad week, and it’s only Tuesday. On Monday, jurors were quickly seated in Oakland for his ‘hero,’ Elon Musk’s, $130 billion trial against him. Monday night, a fresh Wall Street Journal report knocked him down further, describing internal turmoil at OpenAI—slowing user growth, leading to missed revenue goals, leading to a CFO who has reportedly grown nervous about Altman’s appetite for compute.
Now, as Altman sits in the courtroom awaiting Musk’s opening statement, the Nasdaq is taking a hit on the report, falling more than 1% from record territory and pulling down the names tied closely to OpenAI’s commercial orbit. Oracle, which inked a $300 billion data-center partnership with OpenAI last year, fell roughly 5%. CoreWeave dropped 7%. SoftBank, OpenAI’s largest investor, sank nearly 10% in Tokyo overnight (SoftBank is a Japanese company).
