The Goose That Could Not Lay a Trillion Dollars

How a trillion-dollar industry started doing Econ 101 in public, and discovered that the math was never on its side. Somewhere in a glass tower, a banker looked at OpenAI's actual audited numbers, did the arithmetic that everyone had spent three years politely declining to do, and concluded that the most important company of the future could not be sold for a trillion dollars. Then she went and got a coffee. This, more or less, is the whole story. The rest is detail, and the detail is delicious. The trillion-dollar limbo barOpenAI is reportedly thinking about pushing its IPO to 2027, which is a strange thing for a company to do two months after it was, by all accounts, sprinting toward the public markets with the enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered he left the oven on. Sam Altman pushed past his own CFO's caution. A confidential filing was teased. The leak was pre-leaked. And then everything stopped. Why? Because the bankers did not think it would clear a trillion dollars on…