OpenAI The essence of finance is time travel. In the future, your factory will make widgets and you will sell them profitably, so you can borrow money, today, to build the factory to make the widgets to sell to repay the money. If you go to a bank with an architect’s plans for the widget factory, and a business plan for making and selling the widgets, and a good track record of profitably manufacturing and selling widgets, the bank will be happy to lend you the money to build the factory. The bank has people who understand widgets; it can model up a widget factory pretty easily. It will figure out an appropriate leverage level for the factory and lend you that amount of money at, like, 8% interest. Tech startups are an extreme version of this. In the future, human life will be utterly transformed by your invention: We will live on Mars or socialize in the metaverse1 or commute in self-driving flying cars or have omniscient robots in our pockets that can fulfill every human desire. Presumably, also, you can turn that into money. So you can raise money, today, to build the metaverse or cars or robots.

Full opinion : OpenAI’s massive deals show that Sam Altman is selling a vision of a world-changing product and using world-changing financial engineering to try to raise $1 trillion plus.