J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange

Summary

In October, OpenAI secured a 4 billion dollar revolving credit facility from J.P. Morgan and several other banks. I was surprised when I heard this because OpenAI is a young company with no earnings. Shouldn't all their capital come from investors? Let's run some numbers.From first principlesLet's do an Expected Value (EV) calculation, first from the perspective of an investor and then from the perspective of a lender. We'll pick some arbitrary parameters first, then refine.Putting our investor hat on, the possible returns for investing $1,000 into OpenAI look like this:Cost: $1,000Case 1 (90%): OpenAI goes bankrupt. Return: $0Case 2 (9%): OpenAI becomes a big successful company and goes 10x. Return: $10,000Case 3 (1%): OpenAI becomes the big new thing and goes 100x. Return: $100,000Our expected value is: \[\begin{align} EV &= -1000 + 0.9 \times 0 + 0.09 \times 10000 + 0.01 \times 100000\\ EV &= -1000 + 0 + 900 + 1000\\ EV &= 900 \end{align}\] The EV is positive, so this is a good investment. Obviously, there's a 90% chance of it going to zero, so if this were our only investment, it would be an insanely risky one. But provided we can do many investments like this and provided their failure cases aren't correlated, this would be a profitable strategy.What happens if we instead put our lender hat on? Using the same probabilities as above, the possible returns for lending $1,000 to OpenAI at 5% interest look like this:Cost: $1,000Case 1 (90%): OpenAI goes bankrupt. Return: $0Case 2 (9%): OpenAI becomes a big successful company and goes 10x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050Case 3 (1%): OpenAI becomes the big new thing and goes 100x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050Lenders don't benefit directly from the success of the company. Whether it barely scrapes by but manages to repay the loan or becomes the greatest company ever and easily repays the loan, it's all the same to a lender. So, we can merge cases 2 and 3 into:Case 2+3 (10%): OpenAI doesn't go bankrupt. R...