it stands to reason that OpenAI could turn off their R&D, marketing, hype jedi, legal departments and just sell GPT9.999 and turn a profit.

That rests on 2 assumptions:

1) That inference on OpenAI's frontier models is actually cost competitive with open models. Their high SG&A suggests otherwise.

2) That slashing R&D won't lead to a marketshare collapse when everyone (remaining) moves to Anthropic to get on their frontier models. All evidence suggests otherwise again, with Anthropic already exerting enormous competitive pressure on OpenAI's marketshare.

I think OpenAI is in a terribly tenuous position: they're getting squeezed from Anthropic (on the high end) and open models on the low end. A lot of companies in a lot of industries suffered this fate. Getting stuck in the middle is not a good thing!