ChatGPT App Smashes $2B Revenue Since 2023—Leaves Competition Eating AI Dust

Move over, legacy tech—OpenAI’s ChatGPT isn’t just winning the AI race, it’s lapping the field.

The $2B benchmark: No one else is close

While rivals scramble for scraps, ChatGPT’s revenue sprint since 2023 looks more like a monopoly playbook. Funny how ‘disruption’ always ends with one giant sucking up all the oxygen—and venture capital.

The takeaway for tech’s also-rans

When your ‘next big thing’ gets outsold by a chatbot that started as a research demo, maybe rethink that IPO pitch. But hey, at least the metaverse is… oh wait.

The U.S. is ChatGPT’s most valuable market

In U.S. ChatGPT’s spending per download reaches $10, and the country makes up 38% of the app’s total revenue to date. Germany is second, with a 5.3% share.

ChatGPT also leads on installs. It has an estimated 690 million lifetime downloads worldwide, versus 39.5 million for Grok. These numbers are the reason behing the complaints from X owner Elon Musk about the App Store’s charts and ChatGPT’s position there.

Musk  has threatened legal action, alleging Apple has made it “impossible” for apps to compete with OpenAI on the store. He also called OpenAI CEO Sam Altman a “liar” after Altman said Musk uses his platform to “benefit himself and his own companies.”

Apple has rejected Elon Musk’s claims that the App Store suppresses competition, saying it is “designed to be free and fair of bias.”

In 2025 so far, the app has been installed 318 million times, or 2.8 times the 113 million seen in the same period last year. By installs, India ranks first with 13.7% of lifetime downloads, while the U.S. holds second with 10.3%.

As reported by Cryptopolitan just a week ago, Sam Altman played down Elon Musk in a live TV appearance, saying he barely thinks about him, just hours after OpenAI’s system beat Musk’s Grok in a chess tournament.

Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Altman was asked about Musk’s latest criticism of OpenAI and replied, “You know, I don’t think about him that much.” He added “I thought he was just, like, tweeting all day [on X] about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, [we’re] not gonna be a good company and all that.”

The exchange followed an announcement a day earlier from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5, will be built into Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and the standalone Copilot. Musk answered on X with a prediction that “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.”

Nadella replied, “People have been trying for 50 years, and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete.” He also gave a nod to Musk’s Grok 4 chatbot, noting it is already on Azure in a limited preview.

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