Once it no longer is being drafted—and agreed upon by all parties to meet the needed regulatory standards—it will become final and be publicly published.

“Under the JOBS Act, it has been possible since April 2012 for ‘emerging growth companies’ to file a Form S-1 on a confidential basis, only making the contents public 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO” [1]. Since 2017 and 2025 it’s been available to basically all companies [2].

Withdrawing an IPO looks bad. Confidential filing lets issuers start and have the option to abort the process without taking reputational damage. (The specifics of OpenAI’s filing, and any back and forth with the SEC, remains confidential.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1

[2] https://www.sec.gov/about/divisions-offices/division-corpora...

Perhaps Larry Ellison can cut them a nice quid pro quo for a few months to make OpenAI look profitable (like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal), although that's probably unlikely given the debt Oracle is taking on to build it's infra.

Is there a chart, somewhere, like a family tree, of what the Apple and Microsoft stock "ordinary millionaires" went on to do?

(Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)

The for-profit (OpenAI Group PBC) is what's filing the S-1 Draft.

The OpenAI Foundation also exclusively appoints the board of the OpenAI Group PBC and can replace directors at any time.

https://openai.com/our-structure/

(I work at OpenAI, but I am not a lawyer and am not speaking on behalf of OpenAI - just sharing my personal understanding.)

1) In order to fund research - this stuff costs 10s of billions of dollars - everyone, from Ilya, to Elon, to Sam - all agreed that they would require a profit-arm to raise money. Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit.

2) The non profit is still there - and controls the commercial element.