Marketplace - OpenAI is staying private (for now)

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

OpenAI just announced it will delay its IPO due to ongoing AI safety concerns. But when you’re a company as big as OpenAI, where does your funding come from? In this episode, venture capital doesn’t cut it. Plus: Second quarter GDP was revised up thanks to all that corporate AI investment, Kai breaks down why the labor market is kinda like a bathtub, and farmers turn to agritainment as crop revenue shrinks.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.Read the stories in today’s episode:Second quarter GDP growth is brought to you by the letters A and IWhy full employment is like filling a bathtub with waterOpenAI delayed its IPO. That makes private investors happyCorn mazes, apple picking, and hayrides: More farms are leaning into "agritourism"Is your Dijon spicy? Heat and drought might be the causeHow "Neon Tom" made a 40-year career out of neon signs

The economic news, oh, the day, is kind of an alphabet soup, IPO, and PCE, GDP, and J-O-B-S. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Wednesday. Today, this one is the 30th of September. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. All right, so here's where we are as September and the 3rd. quarter come to a close. First of all, inflation. Still a thing we learned from the personal consumption expenditures price index out this morning. Three percent at a core level, that is, of course, repeat after me, minus food and energy. Yes, it is higher than the Federal Reserve wants it to be, but quite a bit lower than everybody had been guessing it would be. So you put that in the

good category. Moving on, we got the final reading on economic growth in the second quarter this morning. GDP grew at an annualized rate of 2.2% April through June, a nice bump from the last estimate, also in the good category. And while consumers do continue to carry this economy, businesses are doing their part, too, specifically business investment. As marketplace Stephanie Hughes reports now to get us going, second quarter GDP was in part brought to you by the letters A and I. You know what could be the motto of American companies right now? Put some A-I on it. Shannon Grimes an economist at Wells Fargo. They're doing what they can to spend on AI today because they don't want to be left behind when it does become revolutionary to their day-to-day work.

Basically, if AI turns out to be an era-defining technology, like say the wheel was, companies don't want to be left without any wheels, dragging way behind their competitors. So they're investing in software and communications equipment. A continued prioritization of things that are high-tech or AI-related. That investment is a driver of GDP. growth. Also a contributor? A lot of this is about data center build out. Ethan St. Drewby is an economics professor at St. Olaf's College. They're building data centers and they're building, you know, they're adding, you know, transmission from the utilities or they're building their gas generators on site in order

to power the stuff. While the building of these structures adds to GDP, some of the chips that go into powering AI are imported, which is subtracted from domestic economic growth. The fact that imports are growing, yeah, it's kind of consistent with that, that like maybe a lot of this equipment is being imported from abroad. Even with that taken into account, Wells Fargo estimates that AI spending accounts for a quarter of GDP growth over the past year. All of this investment is meant to make us more productive. But Truby says it's not entirely clear how that's going to pan out.

The IT boom in the 1990s didn't contribute as much to productivity as you might have expected, given how it seemed like it transformed all of our lives. We don't know yet if AI is the next fax machine, which was, everywhere in the 90s, but ultimately superseded by something else, or if it's the next wheel. I'm Stephanie Hughes for Marketplace. Little of this, little of that on Wall Street today. Stock traders really couldn't decide how they felt about the inflation and growth data that we got. Bond traders, on the other hand, knew exactly how they felt, and they was not happy.

We will have the details when we do the numbers. At the risk of repeating myself, this is Labor Market Week here at Marketplace World Head. quarters. Joltz came yesterday. Low hire. Low fire is still the by word or the by phrase, I guess. ADP private sector data came this morning. First time claims for unemployment benefits are tomorrow, then the September jobs report on Friday. And as we sit here waiting for that September data, a reminder that the unemployment rate last time we were told was 4.1 percent, which I mentioned because of something Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warr said at his press conference just a couple of weeks ago. We believe that the unemployment rate is basically running consistent with full employment,

largely acting consistent with full employment, but in aggregate, we're running more or less at full employment. I guess I think of it more as like a bathtub, right, that you're filling with water. Alicia Sasser Modestino is at Northeastern University, and while you probably would not have expected us to start this story about the labor market in the bathroom, work with me, all right? You know, there's a certain level of water that is ideal, right, so that when you get in the bathtub, it doesn't overflow. But you also want to be in a bathtub where there's enough water that you're going to enjoy that bath, right? And so we can think about workers moving through the labor market where new workers are getting poured in. Some workers are leaving for a variety of reasons. But we always want to have like a nice sort of steady level, warm temperature, not too hot, not too cold labor market.

In other words, the labor market, that is just right. The thing is, that full employment that Chairman Warsh was talking about, even then, there are still some people without jobs. Zero unemployment is actually the world where wages are increasing a lot, prices are increasing a lot. Nobody actually wants to live in that world. That's the lies of Forsyth at the University of Illinois. I think when the Fed is thinking about full employment, they're thinking about what's the level of employment that's not leading to. inflation. That relationship between unemployment and inflation is modeled by something called the Phillips curve, which is a longer explainer for another day. But to give you the gist, in periods of very

low unemployment, there tends to be faster wage growth because workers have more negotiating power because the labor market is so tight. And that in turn can lead to higher inflation. But to get back to the point, is this labor market at full employment like the chairman and his colleagues seem to think? I think it's really tricky to say, right? So I think that the level of unemployment is decent. Decent being 4.1%, which is, to be clear, low by historic standards. But then I think the fact that we're not seeing the churn means that there's sort of warning signs under the hood. Churn, people aren't leaving their jobs for better opportunities. And those who are without a job are having a harder time finding one. Remember, the job openings report we covered yesterday, Jolt, so I mentioned it a minute ago up at the top.

Very much low hire, low fire. So full employment? I don't know. But the good news is there's fresh data coming on Friday. Sam Altman yesterday said that OpenAI is going to hold off ongoing public while it figures out the whole possibly destroying humanity thing. He didn't say it exactly like that, of course. He said the company is not going to push to go public until it can. and here I quote, make confident safety decisions.

An open AI is not the only company deciding that maybe now is not the time to test market capitalism's waters. ORA makes those health tracking rings is also holding off on its IPO, which means both of those companies and others are going to have to look elsewhere to raise money. Marketplace is Subri Beneshore has more on where that elsewhere might be. These companies need a lot of money just to stay alive. OpenAI reportedly had a loss of $39 billion in 2025. So if they're not getting that money from going into the stock market, they got to get it from where they've been getting it all along.

Normally with a startup company, venture capital would be the source of financing. Jay Ritter directs the IPO initiative at the University of Florida. But for a company like OpenA.I, just venture capital? Please. They've also been raising money from major tech firms, from sovereign wealth, funds and from mutual funds. And there's the hedge funds and the super wealthy families and university endowments and pensions and a lot of the same types of investors who would buy stock in a company after its IPO.

These days, they are getting in early more and more. The rationale is pretty simple. I'd rather invest in SpaceX at a 50 billion valuation than have to wait until it's a 1.75 trillion in valuation in the public markets. Greg Martin is co-founder of Rainmaker Securities, which does this. It connects private companies with funding that is not the stock market. He says more startups are staying private longer and longer and getting bigger and bigger. That has been a real dramatic shift over the last, you know, 30 years, but even in the last

five years, you know, we've really seen a lot of these big private companies stay private at valuations that we would have never, never seen before. investors love this because they can make more money. The company's cool with it because it doesn't have to constantly report to shareholders looking over every decision. But all that said, there's still nothing quite like going public. Sarah Kuntz is a managing director at Cleo Capital, a venture capital firm. The stock market has a lot more liquidity in it, a lot more money than even all of the richest people on the planet wanting to make private investments.

So there's a lot of money in private funding, but there's more in the stock. market in New York. I'm Sobri Beneshore for Marketplace. I learned a couple of new words today. They're portmanteaus, actually, that describe a $1.3 billion industry in this economy. Agri-tourism, it seems, is a thing as we head into a fall full of apple picking and hayrides and corn maces. Agratainment is what some people call it. Farmstays are part of that, petting zoos, wine tours as well. And it is booming. More people are going and more farms are doing it. Marketplace to Kelly Wells said about finding out why. Every year, Allison Hall comes out to Patterson Fruit Farm about a half hour east of Cleveland.

It's no different from my childhood. Fruit farms were just a thing that you did. These days, she comes with her husband and her five-year-old son, who is a big fan of one of the farm's attractions. We regularly come to Patterson specifically because of the tractor ride. Patterson's has been a farm since the mid-19th century. But the tractor rides, the slide bar, and the tire swings, those all showed up in the 1990s when the on-site farmer's market got a little too popular. Our market was flooded with people and we said, okay, how do we move some people out of the market? Bill Patterson represents the sixth generation to own the farm.

So we took 50 straw bales and we put them in a pile. And there were hundreds and thousands of kids crawling on 50 straw bales. And we're like, huh, there's something here. Today, Patterson says about a fifth of the farm's revenue comes from its ticketed fun fest area, weddings, and the pick-your-own apple orchards. And so I think we just sort of followed the demand of people. The rest is sales, either in the market on the property or in local grocery stores. The idea here, finding more ways to make money on the same property to generate consistent revenue in a very inconsistent industry. Agriculture prices are going down.

There are issues with weather and also input costs are rising. Diesel prices are in the news at the moment. Claudia Schmidt teaches agricultural economics at Penn State. The USDA gathers data on agritourism every five years. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms in Ohio that do it in some way went up 27%. The number of people who are paying to visit those farms has gone up too, says Lisa Chase. She directs the Vermont Tourism Research Center. Initially, it was about kids with the local food movement, the interest in local food, all of a sudden, you know, college students, teenagers, adults were interested in where does my food come from and how is it produced?

Then the pandemic made buying food from grocery stores feel risky and buying food from a farm feel wholesome. People also began to take an extra interest in vacationing in remote, peaceful, safe. environments. For some farmers, agritourism is a lifeline. How much of your revenue is agritourism versus all of it? All of it, really? Yes. Yeah, so if it rains, we struggle. Mary Ellen Hamlin manages Durthex Farm and Corn Maze about 40 minutes southeast of Cleveland. Her great, great, great, great-grandparents started the farm in 1806. I make about 40 acres of hay, but there's no income in that. We sell the corn after we're done for the season, but the price of corn is, you know, not great either. The 17-acre corn maze started in the late 2000s.

Now there's also a zip line and slides and farm animals to pet, but the insurance she needs to do agritourism keeps getting more expensive every year, and two competing corn mazes have popped up on nearby farms. Now more families are. needing that extra income to survive. Hamlin says adding new ways to earn more money from their farm funds her family's passion, farming their farm. In Northeast Ohio, I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. Coming up.

Hand-bent, sexy, glass neon glow sign. What more could one possibly want? But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is off 443 points today. That's just shy of 9.10%. 50,906. Nasdaq added 63 points, about a quarter percent, 26,000, 8601. The S&P 500 gave it up to the tune of 19 points, a quarter percent, 76 and 51. The maker of Barbie is getting a new CEO, Roger Lynch, whose currently chief executive at Condi Nast is going to be taking over at Mattel. Shares in that toy maker,

sank four and two-tenths at one percent. Swimming pool supply retailer Leslie's closed 76 stores has not been enough to stave off bankruptcy, bankruptcy rather, the company filed for Chapter 11 protection shares down 26 and a half percent, as happens. Bonds down yield on the 10-year T-note. It went up. Again, 5.29% you're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdol.

You know, sometimes you come across a story where you don't really know where it's going to go, and because of that, you wind up looking at an everyday thing in a whole new light. The everyday thing of interest today is a recipe for Dijon mustard chicken. And the story comes from the Toronto Star, courtesy of business reporter Jake Edmiston, whose recipe for the aforementioned mustard chicken is where we're going to start. Jake, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Kai. I need you to tell me, please, about your mustard chicken recipe.

It is from New York Times cooking. It's very simple. You sear off the chicken, some chicken stock, and a good tablespoon of Dijon mustard. except in the dinner in which this story takes place, kind of went off the rails. Yeah, it's one of those things you can tell when people, I don't know if you cook, but you can tell when people around the table,

especially with my family. And mine, and mine. You can tell when they don't like it. And they know that dad has a bit of thin skin, so they don't say it right out, but you can just tell. Like, it wasn't going over well. And there begins the mystery.

And I guess I want to take it to this very interesting fact that I learned in this piece. Canada is the biggest exporter of mustard seeds in the world. So you were kind of on home turf as you tried to figure out what was going on with your Dijon mustard chicken. Little did I know, but yes, much of the mustard made in the world uses Canadian seeds. And I happen to be an hour or two away from one of the major mustard mills that those seeds passed through. before going all over the world. I'm going to take a little sidebar here on the way to what actually happened with this chicken dish.

But it's, I was fascinated to learn what it's like inside a mustard factory. It's, it's a rough place to work. It's so interesting. You walk in and everything is, and I don't know why I was surprised by this, but everything is yellow. And it's, it's as if they've almost surrendered to the fact that there is yellow mustard dust everywhere so that they're, I guess, to save on some cleaning. and I guess the pace at which you work matters in a mustard plant like this because the dust is everywhere.

And if it lands on your skin and you're sweating, then the mustard dust reacts with the sweat. And it becomes almost like it can burn you and it can burn you severely. I talked to one of the guys who had been there for decades. And he said, yeah, it's like a very bad sunburn. Yeah, that was, that was amazing to me. That whole thing was just, was just wild. This was a global search that you went on to find out what happened to your mustard chicken. Cut to the chase here because it's only a four-minute interview and we need to sort of get to the point.

What happened? What did you learn? I learned that my mustard, the mustard that I used in this mustard chicken recipe was much spicier than I was used to extraordinarily spicy. and that's just not me talking. I brought it to a professional taste tester who confirmed it. And it wasn't just this jar. It was part of a broader phenomenon that's been happening. In Canada, particularly in the place in the prairies where we grow much of our mustard seeds, they've had hotter, drier growing conditions for the past five years.

And when you have hotter, drier growing conditions, you get hotter, spicier mustard seeds. Same thing's happening as we've heard with like wine grapes and all of of that thing. So this is climate change and agriculture sort of brought to your dinner table. Bizarrely, yes. Luckily, we have something called the Canadian Grain Commission in this country, and it's basically they keep an eye on the quality of our exports to protect our farmers' reputations around the world. And there was someone in an office in Winnipeg who was tracking for the past five years the levels in the particular mustard seed, the levels of this compound. It's thought to be a defense against predators, but this compound is what makes mustard spicy, what makes other

plants in this family like arugula like horseradish what gives them their kick as well. Huh. All right, so let's bring it home. How are you changing your mustard chicken recipe? You're just going to use less?

Or you're going to get a different mustard? I got a taste in the jar because that's the thing. That's the thing is there's not much you can change when it comes to Dijon mustard. It's basically three ingredients. There's not a lot of leverage you can pull. A lot of readers have told me this.

It was a boneheaded move to begin with, which was you got to taste your ingredients before you put it in. This was a brand new jar and I just threw in a bunch of mustard. Oh, man. Jake Edmiston, he's at the Toronto Star. You should read this piece. It's really good. Jake, thanks a bunch. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me. Technology can be scary. Not artificial intelligence is going to kill us all scary, although that too. But mostly here I was thinking about change and how for small businesses in particular, the worry is that all the newfangled tech is going to totally upend a way of doing business. For some, though, adapting to new technology might, actually be the path back to what you do best, which leads us to today's installment of our series

My Economy. My name is Neon Tom Brickler, and I started Fish Tail Neon in 1986. We're right here in the north side of Chicago, and we custom make neon lights. I'll go wherever anybody wants a neon sign, and I've become such good friends with people all across the city. It's not only just the signs, but even just the relationships that I've made with some of these people. If you're going to name some of the famous signs in the city of Chicago and things like that, I'm going to name you the families and the people that are running these business that I got to talk to. In the last five years or so, LED lights have come along, and anybody that, you know, is a neon lover or a neon purist, will immediately dismiss LED as saying, you know, that's not neon and it's not the same thing.

and I'm really supposed to be one that's supposed to hate the new technology, but instead of hating it, I've embraced everything. We do both LED, we both and do neon. But now there's been a wave that's kind of come back from it all. People say into themselves, you know what? You know, this LED, I want that real glass sign again. I want that handmade, hand-bent, sexy, glass neon glow sign. You know, talking about the future of neon and the future

of neon even in Chicago. You know, it really, it really isn't that bright of a picture. You know, what I, what is lacking is, is skilled people to bring it into the future. I was at a point where I had, where I had a turnover with employees.

And, you know, I wasn't sure how it was going to carry on into the future. And then I got, I got fortunate. I hired a young grader, from the Yard Institute that took neon, and she's with me to this day. I think it's almost where she's on her second year right now that's been helping me out. You know, I'll sit there and say, hey, hey, Elyn, look, here's six broken signs that came in. And then she'll say something like, oh, sweet. And I'll say to myself, yeah, that's kind of how I feel about it.

A lot of people are saying to me, Tom, you know what? When are you going to, when do you think you're going to retire? and what would you do? And I'm thinking to myself, retire. I think I want to do this when I retire. And I think that I really kind of retired maybe 40 years ago when I started doing this because it's always been fun for me.

It's always been a challenge. And it really doesn't feel like work, even though we're like non-stop working all the time. Leon Tom Brickler, how about him? Neon Shop Fish Tail? He's in Chicago, Illinois. Whether you have been in business for days or decades, your stories are what make this economy go round. So share them with us, would you?

Marketplace.org slash my economy. This final note on the way out today in which, yay, consumers, but also, whoa, consumers. Among the data points we got today was information on, first of all, personal spending, which was up 610% in August from July, which, as we talk about all the time, is helping to keep this economy going. But, and we also learned the personal saving rate fell in August to the lowest it's been in almost four years. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, John Foki, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostead, Gary O'Keefe, and Charlton Thorpe. Alex Simpson is the manager of media production. And I'm Kai Rizdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

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