Look at what happened with Uber: they were a giant incinerator that ran on investment cash for years and years and years in a low interest rate environment.
Since we have an at least somewhat-sane fiscal policy for the time being, they can't do that anymore. Now, they have to find other source of cheap cash that comes with few or no strings that could ever make the almighty founder class have to consider someone else.
Could they compete with other investments on the open market by adjusting what shareholders could expect? Sure, but that would mean potentially diluting the equity that the founders and early investors could get, and when you consider that OpenAI thought that the 100x cap wasn't generous enough, I think you get an idea of what kind of greed we're dealing with here.
Passive investors were their target for this: lots of money, not a lot of questions.
It'll be interesting to see what they go for next. I'm willing to bet Trump starts screaming at the Fed to lower rates again.