Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing
OpenAI Misses Expectations - Should Tech Investors Worry?
28 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Open AI Jitters on Motley Fool's Hidden Gems Investing Podcast. Welcome to Mindful Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Tyler Crowe, and with my longtime colleagues and Fool contributors, Lou Whiteman and Matt Frankel. Earnings are kicking up. MAG7 have not reported yet, so we're going to take a quick pause to not talk about MAG7 earnings, although that's probably going to be on later shows this week.
Instead, we want to start today talking about OpenAI and some struggles that were released in the Wall Street Journal. We're going to talk General Motors' earnings, as well as hitting a mailbag question that we got earlier in the week. But like I said at the top, we're going to start with OpenAI.
There was a Wall Street Journal article that came out either last night or this morning that was reporting that OpenAI isn't meeting some of its user revenue goals, and it's making all that spending and compute power that we've been talking about for the past several weeks, months, even a couple of years, it's getting harder to swallow. And there's been some knock-on effects on the market as well.
Shares of companies with close ties to OpenAI are down on the news, thinking companies like Oracle and CoreWeave. Now, guys, I'm going to ask you, Lou, Matt, I'm going to ask you guys your thoughts on this in a minute. But this is what stood out to me, is that CEO Sam Altman is trying to move towards an IPO somewhat aggressively. But the company raised $122 billion less than a month ago.
And I find it odd that a company that has raised so much money recently is already preparing an IPO for what I would assume is more funding. I thought that's what IPOs are for. There's a bunch of other angles I'm sure we can take here. You guys all have your own takes, but let's start with this.
Are companies that have hitched their wagon to open AI, like the Oracles, like the Corweaves of World, in a little bit of stress or trouble here based on what was said in this Wall Street Journal report? Matt, let's start with you.
Nobody has been more skeptical about OpenAI's longer-term revenue projections, all these circular deals we're seeing among these AI companies. No one's been more skeptical about all this than me. Maybe you. Management has said $280 billion of revenue by 2030. That's more than Nvidia has by a mile.
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Chapter 2: What recent challenges is OpenAI facing?
But take this report with a big grain of salt. The report said that OpenAI missed its internal growth projections, which have been aggressive. It didn't specify by how much it missed. As Tyler mentioned, with a recent $122 billion raise and an upcoming IPO, the company shouldn't have much of a problem fulfilling at least its near-term contractual obligations.
On a similar note, though, I feel like Oracle's investors are already very skeptical about OpenAI's ability to pay for what it's agreed to pay already over the long term, even before today's downward movement. Oracle was down 50% since that surge after the OpenAI deal was announced in September, and a big reason why has to be investor skepticism over the deal's feasibility.
Yeah. I don't know who's been more skeptical, Matt or Tyler, who's the most skeptical, but it feels like it's hard to find someone other than Sam Altman who hasn't been skeptical about OpenAI's grand pronouncements. I guess maybe, though, the C-suites at Oracle and CoreWeave would be the exceptions, the ones that weren't. Thing is, you know,
These are long-term projections in a Wild West market, a market that still hasn't formed. Two years ago, when OpenAI was the bell of the ball, was riding high, had we even heard of Anthropic? No. In theory, I don't know why that can't happen again. I'm not saying it will, but I don't think first-mover advantage here really matters.
I'm not sure that even if OpenAI isn't on a winning streak today, that really can be extrapolated into the future. My question is, how does any of this make sense, guys? Who's going to make money here? Part of the reason OpenAI put out outrageous revenue assumptions is they have to offset outrageous spending needs. Anthropic is throttling people because compute is so expensive.
OpenAI still needs to raise money. I think the market just needs to wake up to just how much money is needed here. It feels like one of three things has to happen. Either, number one, we need models that really dramatically bring down the compute demand, so there's just less that needs to be spent.
Number two, these hyperscalers somehow end up with amazing pricing power from here, even though they're competing with each other, and jack up the prices. Or, I don't know, maybe these valuations aren't sustainable.
I hate to say it, but maybe. I like the point of OpenAI could come back around, ChatGPT could have a comeback. We've seen these AI models rise and fall really quickly. It makes you think of internet search browsers of the 90s, where it was Netscape, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo were the dominant forces for a long time. And then before you know it, Google comes around and wallops them all.
There's no reason to think that something like that couldn't happen here. And to your point about lower compute, Lou, In related news, DeepSeek, the Chinese open-sourced AI model that had everyone shaking in their boots in January last year, like, oh my goodness, they can do this on basically spare car parts. How the heck did they do this?
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Chapter 3: How do OpenAI's struggles affect its partners like Oracle?
expected tariff refund of about $500 million. They also notched some one-time costs of about $1 billion related to its pivot in the electric vehicle business strategy that boosted the end results and exceeded investor expectations. we could probably discuss the pivot to EVs in the middle of a rising gas crisis. Sounds like an interesting topic for another time.
But Matt, you were the one that put GM on our radar, and it's been a stock you have been really pounding the table for a while. Looking through the report, what really stood out to you?
I don't want to fixate on the headline numbers. You already covered some of those, although earnings were stronger than expected after those adjustments that you mentioned. The tariff refunds also were largely expected, just now we have some actual numbers behind them. It was just a solid quarter all around for GM. Margins were strong despite a challenging consumer environment.
GM's incentives to buyers, pretty impressively, are at the very low end of the industry. A lot of carmakers are having to give big discounts, give big financing incentives, things like that. GM is definitely lower than average on that. The company maintained its number one U.S. market share for total sales, which that wasn't a surprise. It is the clear No. 2 in EVs.
Cadillac EV sales, which my wife bought one not that long ago, grew 20% year over year. GM now has a 13% market share, and that's up sequentially from 10%. So they have a pretty good share of the EV market, only behind Tesla. Because of the solid results and the reduced tariff impact, GM did raise its guidance pretty significantly.
They're now calling for $12.50 per share in earnings at the midpoint. That implies GM's trading for 6.4X full-year earnings. Beyond the headline numbers, one thing I would say to watch, because we always talk about software and SaaS businesses and things like that, is the software and services side of GM. Super Cruise, paid subscriptions were up 70% year-over-year.
GM expects to have $850,000 by the end of this year. This is going to be a very high-margin revenue stream. Most reviews agree that Super Cruise is the best, with the exception of maybe Tesla, and I've driven it, so I can attest to that. Software has been a big focus of Mary Barra's growth strategy.
It's not just Super Cruise, but OnStar has 13 million paid subscribers, and it's largely flown under the radar, and it's starting to become a significant revenue stream.
Yeah, I'd be really curious to see how sustainable that is, because you have a 100-year tradition in the auto business of features starting as premium and moving downstream to standard. I mean, my Honda can do 90% of what Super Cruise does, and it came as standard, non-subscription.
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Chapter 4: What are the long-term revenue projections for AI companies?
I think I'm fascinated. I don't know which way it's going to go, whether or not GM will continue to have pricing power and be able to keep those margins, or if it'll just end up as standard equipment the way windshield wipers and, you know, electric windows and everything else has done over time.
I'll say this for GM, I hope for their sake it does because the core industry, the core business is just brutal. When times are good, it's a brutal business. They would really, really benefit from some high-margin software sales. I'm just not sure if we can really pencil that into the foreseeable future.
doesn't want to be a high-margin software sales company. Even the autos want to get in on this. A couple of weeks ago, we did a longer show on the Chinese EV market and how competitive it is. Talking about the competitive American market, it seems like the Chinese EV market is even more competitive today.
That really bore out because BYD announced its earnings earlier this week as well, and they saw their earnings fall 55%. Yes, GM's earnings were down from the year prior, but This is not even close when you're talking about the EV market in China right now. It shows how competitive the Chinese market and some of the non-U.S. international markets are compared to what's going on in the U.S.
It seems like, in a lot of the international markets, I hate to use this word because it insinuates things related to trade, but the Chinese electric vehicles are, quote-unquote, flooding the market.
Flooding, or another word for that might be winning. Look, I know we like bold predictions around here. I don't know if this is really going to happen, but I do think this is the way the stars are aligning. GM's strength is pickups and SUVs. We see that with Ford, too. The U.S. remains this amazing island, fighting back against global trends towards fuel economy, smaller cars, all of that.
I'd note that, look, elsewhere, it's not so good. GM sales were down 22% year-over-year in China. I think it's possible that between tariffs, consumer preferences, restrictions on foreign imports to the U.S. market, we're evolving towards a world where GM and the other U.S. automakers will just dominate the U.S. market, but have a really hard time competing basically everywhere else.
Good news there is the U.S. market's very big, but it's not what we would have imagined just 20 years ago.
Coming up after the break, we're going to go dip into the mailbag. Hey, everyone, just a quick reminder. If you want to get your questions in, we love answering questions. This is probably at least my favorite segment that we get to do on the podcast. So get your questions in as much as you can. We are clearly getting way more than we can actually answer. And I'm going to do my best to try to...
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