The Stack Overflow logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen (Thomas Fuller/Getty Images)
The platform is raking in millions of dollars in revenue, with AI an ironic new source of revenue.
When Elon Musk described Stack Overflow’s plight as “death by LLM” in July 2023, he wasn’t exaggerating.
Having been the go-to resource for developers looking for technical help for a long time, Stack Overflow neared the peak of its powers during the pandemic, with coders seeking the evergreen information on the company’s popular Q&A forum. But amid a wave of powerful code-writing AI assistants like ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot, traffic to the site has plummeted.
Last month, Stack Overflow recorded just 6,866 questions — roughly equal to the typical volume when the site first launched back in 2008.
Sherwood News
But while Stack Overflow the Q&A forum looks dead, Stack Overflow the company looks to be limping along.
Unlike Chegg and other knowledge hubs that have fallen victim to generative AI, Stack Overflow has found a way to monetize its enormous back catalog of content. Indeed, even with engagement falling off a cliff since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, the company’s annual revenue has roughly doubled to $115 million. Losses have slimmed, too, from $84 million in FY2023 to $22 million as of the last fiscal year, as desperate cost-cutting efforts, including mass layoffs, helped boost the bottom line.
Once dependent on ads across its buzzy forum, Stack Overflow now primarily makes money from enterprise solutions like “Stack Internal,” which provides a generative-AI add-on powered by the millions of questions and answers on the site through the years. Stack Internal is now used by 25,000 companies around the world. It also licenses its data to AI companies, in a Reddit-like model — a platform that made more than $200 million from licensing user-generated content in 2024.
Put simply, Stack Overflow’s new niche is the trust built by its old community and their expertise. In the words of CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar last December:
“...when we saw the questions decline in early 2023, what we realized is that pretty much all those declines were with very simple questions. The complex questions still get asked on Stack because there’s no other place. If the LLMs are only as good as the data, which is typically human curated, we’re one of the best places for that, if not the best for technology.”
Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models... which need huge chunks of data to work. Stack Overflow has become a fascinating canary in tech’s new, circular coal mine.
WSJ: OpenAI plans Q4 IPO in race to be the first AI startup to enter public markets
OpenAI was the first to the generative AI market with ChatGPT, and now it hopes to be the first of its AI startup cohort to pull off an initial public offering, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The $500 billion startup is in a race against its $350 billion competitor Anthropic to IPO, who has also been exploring one.
According to the report, OpenAI is in talks with banks to try for a fourth-quarter IPO this year, which has the potential to be one of the largest IPOs ever, in a year that is expected to see many record breaking tech companies make tap into public markets to raise massive new rounds of capital.
Ahead of a potential public listing, OpenAI is reportedly attempting to raise a massive round of private investment. The company is reportedly aiming to raise $100 billion, with Amazon potentially accounting for up to half that target. Other investors in talks with OpenAI over the private fundraising round include Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank.
According to the report, OpenAI is in talks with banks to try for a fourth-quarter IPO this year, which has the potential to be one of the largest IPOs ever, in a year that is expected to see many record breaking tech companies make tap into public markets to raise massive new rounds of capital.
Ahead of a potential public listing, OpenAI is reportedly attempting to raise a massive round of private investment. The company is reportedly aiming to raise $100 billion, with Amazon potentially accounting for up to half that target. Other investors in talks with OpenAI over the private fundraising round include Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank.
From Bloomberg:
“The firm has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, an idea that some investors are pushing, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Separately, they are also exploring a tie-up between SpaceX and xAI ahead of an IPO, some of the people said.”
Musk’s companies already have numerous relationships between themselves, including most recently Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI. At Tesla’s shareholder meeting last year, shareholders voted to invest in the company but the board didn’t approve the measure due to significant abstentions.
In 2024, SpaceX incurred about $2.4 million in expenses under commercial, licensing, and support agreements with Tesla, and Tesla incurred about $800,000 in expenses for Musk’s use of SpaceX’s jet.
From Bloomberg:
“The firm has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, an idea that some investors are pushing, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Separately, they are also exploring a tie-up between SpaceX and xAI ahead of an IPO, some of the people said.”
Musk’s companies already have numerous relationships between themselves, including most recently Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI. At Tesla’s shareholder meeting last year, shareholders voted to invest in the company but the board didn’t approve the measure due to significant abstentions.
In 2024, SpaceX incurred about $2.4 million in expenses under commercial, licensing, and support agreements with Tesla, and Tesla incurred about $800,000 in expenses for Musk’s use of SpaceX’s jet.
WSJ: Amazon considering $50 billion investment in OpenAI
What a difference half a day makes. Earlier today, The Information reported that Amazon was considering investing roughly $10 billion to $20 billion in OpenAI as part of a $60 billion fundraising round alongside Nvidia and Microsoft. Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting the e-commerce giant could invest up to $50 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a larger, $100 billion funding round. The Financial Times also earlier reported today a $100 billion funding round but with smaller amounts from Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX reportedly in talks to merge with xAI
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly exploring a merger between SpaceX and his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, a move that would bundle rockets, satellites, the social media site X, and AI under one company ahead of SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO.
According to Reuters reporting, the deal would swap xAI shares for SpaceX stock, potentially valuing the combined operation north of $1 trillion.
Reuters reports:
“
Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.
Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its primary rationale, or its potential timing.
Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company
’
s chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company
’
s only officer, the filings show.
”
The combined companies could also set the narrative groundwork for putting data centers in space — an idea that Musk and a number of other tech billionaires have been floating lately but that may not get off the ground.
In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year, Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.
Reuters reports:
“
Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.
Reuters could not determine the value of the deal, its primary rationale, or its potential timing.
Corporate filings in Nevada show that those entities were set up on January 21. One of them, a limited liability company, lists SpaceX and Bret Johnsen, the company
’
s chief financial officer, as managing members, while the other lists Johnsen as the company
’
s only officer, the filings show.
”
The combined companies could also set the narrative groundwork for putting data centers in space — an idea that Musk and a number of other tech billionaires have been floating lately but that may not get off the ground.
In its earnings filings yesterday, Tesla disclosed that it recently made a $2 billion investment in xAI. Last year, Musk’s xAI bought Musk’s X in an all-stock deal.
Latest Stories
Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.