OpenAI won’t save itself with Disney deal

It’s hard to imagine any company seemingly putting its thumb on the scale for another company more than Bob Iger’s Disney just did for Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

On the same day that Disney filed a lawsuit against Google for what it sees as unlicensed use of its intellectual property, it also licensed some of that property for use in Sora, the video generator created by Google’s main rival, OpenAI. Just to clarify which side of the AI ​​feud Mouse House was on, Iger also invested in Altman’s company to the tune of a billion dollars.

But coincidence of timing aside, it’s also hard to imagine the deal doing Altman any more good than Iger.

OpenAI is spending so freely right now that $1 billion will cover 3-4 weeks of its estimated losses (see below for calculations) or a thousandth of its spending commitments.

Based on these numbers, OpenAI needs more than 1,001 Disney offerings to continue. (There might be a movie in there!) And now, on top of that, OpenAI will pay the world’s largest media company so its users can make a video using one of Disney’s approved characters.

Disney, meanwhile, gets a piece of the business, the glory of being an AI player, and a carefully curated, user-created stream of new content for Disney+. It’s a lose-win!

Why would Altman agree to such a deal? Perhaps because of the size of the hole OpenAI finds itself in. That scale could become clearer this month, in a flurry of surveys and estimates. OpenAI is in trouble, said the Atlantic — and in one of the publication’s most serious burns ever, he dubbed the creator of ChatGPT the “Netscape of AI.”

(Netscape was also a web browser pioneer, but couldn’t compete when tech giants like Microsoft built their own models; ultimately, AOL purchased Netscape).

How much money is OpenAI actually losing?

This takedown seemed slight next to a tech journalist’s typical summary: “You have no idea how screwed OpenAI is.” (And this was written before Altman’s “Code Red” was declared last month, when Google Gemini launched and OpenAI began hemorrhaging users.)

How fucked up, exactly, a moving target. Just ask Deutsche Bank, which this month also began hammering nails into OpenAI’s coffin. Deutsche analyst Jim Reid estimated the company’s future losses at $140 billion, between 2024 and 2029 alone.

Given OpenAI’s commitments to spending on new infrastructure — more than $1 trillion, or 1,000 Disney contracts — Reid can be optimistic in suggesting the company will be around that long.

We can’t review the books, since OpenAI is also the largest private business, but it appears Altman has fully embraced a burn rate that makes the dot-com bubble era look reasonable.

In the first half of 2025 alone, according to The informationOpenAI revenue was $4.3 billion; total spending was $17.8 billion.

“No startup in history has operated with expected losses of this magnitude,” Reid wrote.

No joke. When you make a billion dollar deal with Disney and that deal covers less than a month of your lossesso…well, you might break out in panic sweats too. And you too may be looking for as many deals with as much Disney as possible.

Disney now joins the ranks of Softbank, Microsoft (which made its first $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019) or NVIDIA (which struck a $100 billion deal with OpenAI tying them to the use of NVIDIA chips). These are the companies you need on your side if your money is going to run out at any time.

Perhaps you’d look to get a bailout from one, or all, of these deep pockets eventually. Perhaps you would even consider a US government bailout, as some sources suggest.

And maybe if all is lost and OpenAI’s valuation heads south, you’d hope that someone like Iger would do for OpenAI what AOL did for Netscape.