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Editor's note: Due to a technical error, this morning's Weekend Pitch was sent without the main column. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Ninety minutes was all it took a federal jury to reject Elon Musk’s claim that OpenAI execs Sam Altman and Greg Brockman “stole a charity” when the AI giant partnered with Microsoft and created a for-profit arm. The jury found that Musk waited too long to sue, which the judge concurred with, clearing a major legal overhang on OpenAI's anticipated IPO plans.
The trial highlighted a question that will follow OpenAI into the public markets: Will its status as a public benefit corporation—the do-gooder company structure it adopted last October—shape its business pursuits? With OpenAI free to remain a for-profit company with a public benefit goal baked in, a structure rival Anthropic also adopted, upcoming IPO plans will test investors' appetite for corporate priorities beyond growing the value of their shares.
I'm Jacob Robbins, and this is The Weekend Pitch. You can reach me at jacob.robbins@pitchbook.com or on LinkedIn.
"A lot of people would say there's plenty of room to do pro-social things, as long as you can argue with a straight face that doing those pro-social things will ultimately lead to greater profits," said Michael Dorff, a visiting law professor at UCLA and author of a book on PBCs published in 2023. “It's very hard to enforce a core mission because of something called the 'business judgment rule,' which in essence says that as long as the board is acting in an informed way in good faith, the courts will give you enormous deference.”
Corporate law in Delaware, where both companies are incorporated, requires a PBC board to balance profits with a stated mission of public benefit. But how that balancing happens and how it gets enforced is left almost entirely up to the board’s discretion, and legal scholars say OpenAI’s stated benefit of "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity" is broad enough to cover nearly any decision.
“For-profit versus a public benefit corporation—there’s no difference,” said Brian JM Quinn, a professor of corporate law at Boston College Law School. |
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| Tim Draper bought 30K BTC at $632. Now he’s betting on rentals. |
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A "soonicorn" is defined by PitchBook as a company valued over €500 million with the potential of turning into a unicorn. According to our latest research, European soonicorns are currently worth €126 billion (about $146 billion) in aggregate. How many Europe-based soonicorns are there?
A) 133
B) 153
C) 173
D) 193
Find your answer at the bottom of The Weekend Pitch! |
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A selection from our most-read articles of the past few days.
- For the first time, Anthropic is reportedly worth more than OpenAI—and the valuation flip reflects a widening gap in investor confidence, enterprise adoption and equity returns between the two AI rivals. Find out more
- SpaceX's S-1 is out—and we've put together six charts breaking down everything behind the $18 billion revenue figure, the $4.9 billion net loss, and what the numbers mean for investors eyeing a generational liquidity event. Read it now
- Blackstone and Google's $5 billion joint venture goes beyond data centers—it's a bet that chips, power and compute contracts can be financed like infrastructure, marking a new frontier for PE in the AI boom. Read more
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“If you compare xAI to a traditional SaaS company, the financials look reckless. The ‘insanity’ isn’t in the spending but the bet that by the time other firms get their GPU clusters online, xAI will have already moved the goalposts toward autonomous physical agents. If that payoff happens, the $1B+ per month burn will be viewed as a bargain. If it doesn’t, we are looking at the largest venture-funded correction in history.”
—Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook who covers the major AI frontier labs, speaking about the financials of Elon Musk's xAI. To see what else the SpaceX S-1 filing reveals about the Grok maker's accelerating losses, read more here. |
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| (Stas-Bejsov/Getty Images) |
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Answer: C
Our latest data shows that startup valuations in Europe are continuing their upward trajectory. The total number of European soonicorns now sits at 173, supporting a unicorn market that has surpassed €500 billion. Read more in our Q1 2026 European VC Valuations Report. |
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This edition of The Weekend Pitch was written by Jacob Robbins and Nadine Manske. It was edited by Kia Kokalitcheva and Nadine Manske.
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