OpenAI’s Projections Beat Apple, Google, and Facebook’s Best Years. Do You Buy It?

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.