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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

Profit? It's a 501(c).

As someone who is the Treasurer/Secretary of a 501(c)(3) non-profit I can tell you that is it always possible for a non-profit to bring in more revenue than it costs to run the non-profit. You can also pay salaries to people out of your revenue. The IRS has a bunch of educational material for non-profits[1], and a really good guide to maintaining your exemption [2].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/publications-for-e...

[2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p4221pc.pdf

Yes. Kaiser Permanente is a good example to illustrate your point. Just Google “Kaiser Permanente 501c executive salaries white paper”.

The parent is, OpenAI Global, LLC is a for profit non-wholly-owned subsidiary with outside investors; there's also OpenAI LP, which is a for-profit limited partnership with the no profit as general partner, also with outside investors (I thought it was the predecessor of the LLC, but they both seem to have been formed in 2019 and still exist?) OpenAI has for years been a nonprofit shell around a for-profit firm.

EDIT: A somewhat more detailed view of the structure, based on OpenAI’s own description, is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38312577

Thanks for explaining the basic structure. It seems quite opaque and probably designed to be. It would be nice if someone can determine which entities he currently still has a position or equity in.

Since this news managed to crush HN's servers it's definitely a topic of significant interest.

A non-profit can make plenty of profit, there just aren't any shareholders.

Depends if you're talking about "OpenAI, Inc." (non-profit) or "OpenAI Global, LLC" (for profit corporation). They're both under the same umbrella corporation.

NFL was a non profit up until 2015ish

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