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dcre 8 hours ago

You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated.

tovej 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If he meant that he would've said July revenue, not ARR. ARR means it's multiplied by twelve.

dcre 8 hours ago | parent [-]

She, and we do not have the direct quote. It's a paraphrase, and the report can't seem to decide whether they're talking about revenue or growth. If she was talking about growth, "the ARR growth in July exceeded the ARR growth of Q2" is perfectly coherent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-tells...

OP is way overinterpreting something we don't even have verbatim in a way that unfortunately resembles what they're rightly accusing Zitron of.

SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" would be a very normal thing to say, but you're skipping over some of the words. Unless revenue is sharply dropping, annualized recurring revenue in any month will exceed the revenue incurred in any quarter, because it's an annualized figure.

I think the most likely explanation is that the CFO misspoke and intended to say something more like your quote, or perhaps she spoke correctly and was misquoted. But without audited financial statements, all we have is speculation, and there have definitely been times in the past when executives of major companies made intentionally misleading statements about their revenue. (In fact, this thread began with a question about why you can't just look at the numbers, and here the answer is that nobody has reported the actual revenue numbers this comparison is based on.)

dcre 8 hours ago | parent [-]

But you are using the misquote to do the thing Zitron does that you hate! I don't get it!

8 hours ago | parent | next [-]
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SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I didn't say I hate it. I've never seen any reason to doubt that Ed Zitron is a great guy who's working hard to tell the truth as he understands it.

My point is that any discussion of how a large, complex company is doing requires making judgment calls about which numbers are more or less reliable, do or don't matter, etc. This is especially so when it's a private company that has not yet any kind of meaningful disclosures. So if you don't think Ed Zitron's judgment is sound, there's no good way to adjust his commentary for that and "just look at the numbers", because the numbers have been filtered by his judgment even if they all came from accurate underlying sources.

dcre 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Completely agree there.