OpenAI’s bad week misses the point, says tech analyst Gene Munster: ‘I think this is a true story—it is an example of over-analyzing’

Sam Altman is having a pretty bad week, and it’s only Tuesday. On Monday, jurors were quickly seated in Oakland for his ‘hero,’ Elon Musk’s, $130 billion trial against him. Monday night, a fresh Wall Street Journal report knocked him down further, describing internal turmoil at Open AI—slowing user growth, leading to missed revenue goals, leading to a CFO who has reportedly grown nervous about Altman’s appetite for compute. Now, as Altman sits in the courtroom awaiting Musk’s opening statement, the Nasdaq is taking a hit on the report, falling more than 1% from record territory and pulling down the names tied closely to OpenAI’s commercial orbit. Oracle, which inked a $300 billion data-center partnership with OpenAI last year, fell roughly 5%. CoreWeave dropped 7%. SoftBank, OpenAI’s largest investor, sank nearly 10% in Tokyo overnight (SoftBank is a Japanese company). Gene Munster isn’t buying it. “I think this is a true story—it is an example of over-analyzing,” the veteran tech analyst and managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management told Fortune. “It can miss the bigger picture. The bigger picture: it’s still growing, we’re still early in AI, and they’re still in a great place.” The question behind the question The headline concern is real. OpenAI has reportedly committed itself to roughly $600 billion in future compute spending—a number that only makes sense if revenue keeps roughly doubling each year. ChatGPT’s growth has begun to slow as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini eat into its market share in different segments. The WSJ report quoted CFO Sarah Friar’s private concern that the company isn’t ready for public-market disclosure standards—stoking fears of an “AltaVista moment” for the original AI front-runner. AltaVista is an old Fortune metaphor, for those who never used it before it shut down in the early 2010s, was the