Hacker News
WSJ: The Sudden Fall of Sora — Downloads Collapsed 66%, Disney Found Out About Shutdown Less Than an Hour Before Public
The Wall Street Journal chronicles Sora's rapid decline: downloads peaked at 3.33M in November 2025 and fell 66% to 1.13M by February 2026, while burning an estimated $1M-$15M daily in inference costs against just $2.1M in lifetime in-app revenue. Disney, which committed $1B to the partnership, learned of the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement. Sam Altman killed Sora to free compute as Claude Code was reportedly 'eating OpenAI's lunch' in the enterprise developer segment. 44 points, 39 comments on HN.
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