Will they eat each others potential capital appetite? Or is there just that much laying around for them all to gobble up the bag?
EDIT - but that's just the IPO, I wasn't even thinking about how much insiders will want to sell after the lockup ends...
I would invest in OpenAI or Anthropic or both but I doubt I'd invest in SpaceX.
If you look at the way the dotcom bubble unfolded, dotcom didn't take off until after Netscape IPOed in 1995. The market had 5 more years of growth until the collapse. And even after collapse, the Nasdaq was 2x higher post pop than in 1995.
If history repeats itself, the stock market will take off after OpenAI and/or Anthropic IPOs. Be scared when random AI companies IPO with bad ideas and no revenue.
My posts on AI bubble over the years:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40739829
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385830
OpenAI is 10 years old. It has about 4500 employees. It's raised about $180B in capital, and has a valuation of roughly $900B on about $25B in revenue. Anthropic is 5 years old. It also has around 3000-5000 employees. It will have raised about $120-140B in capital, at a $900B valuation, on about $30-45B in revenue.
In the 80s and 90s companies IPO'd to actually raise growth capital - the public markets provided the money they needed to invest and expand, and then public investors reaped the benefits of their success, or paid the price of their failure. In the 2010s and 2020s companies grow with private capital, which has fewer strings attached, and then they unload the shares on the public market when they reach the top of their growth curve, leaving the public holding the bag.
There are definitely some dogs that IPOd and went straight down, but investing in the broad stock market has absolutely not been a bag holding experience in the past decade+
Shouldn't we at least be a little bit scared already when shoe companies pivot to AI and their stock goes up ~750%?
* big banks are trying to get out of their data center loan commitments, even selling that debt at a discount. From the article:
> According to the Financial Times, major lenders are already scrambling to offload pieces of massive data center loans through private transactions, risk transfers and synthetic structures. The reason is simple. AI infrastructure borrowing is reaching sizes that are beginning to choke the arteries of the financial system itself.
* there are real questions about long-term liquidity and capital capacity across the entire VC ecosystem. Ed Zitron estimates that the available capital for all technology VC funds will be fully exhausted within roughly two years if current spending levels hold steady. More money has been spent on AI in the last decade than the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Space Program and the US highway system combined[1]
* short-term success of these new data centers coming online is heavily reliant on steady fuel prices since hooking up to the grid can take years and many burn diesel generators while waiting for grid access. If the war in Iran drags on, high fuel prices will continue to ratchet up the cost of data center operations.
* public sentiment around the economy was largely positive heading into the collapse, whereas we've been in fairly consistent state of economic uncertainty for years now. Affordability was not a topic of conversation back then and a majority of Americans are unhappy with the direction of the economy in 2026.
0: https://www.investing.com/analysis/the-ai-boom-is-starting-t...
1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spen...
This isn't necessarily a sign that they don't believe in the data centre loans, it's more than banks are basically required to avoid concentrated risk, because of the regulations we (mostly correctly) imposed upon them post GFC.
Now, personally I'm not convinced there's enough demand for AI services that these datacentres make sense, but we'll see I guess.
They are not very comparable - go list out the characteristics for it to be a viable comparison.
What even is this post? Desperate for validation? LMAO
Both Altman and Dario have consistently said inference margins are high.
I understand that a lot of people want to cash out, but I'm surprised they're ready to share, especially given I don't think they've had issues bringing in funding in the private markets, but maybe I'm wrong.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de...
So as we can clearly observe: "AGI" which at this point is (A Giant IPO) is almost here.
Now all of humanity will benefit from this being e̶x̶i̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶q̶u̶i̶d̶i̶t̶y̶ shared by everyone for everyone. Right?
The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.
Anthropic or OpenAI IPOing is literally signing their own death certificate.
The valuation will go to zero as soon as they have to submit actual numbers instead of the salad of bullshit they usually serve investors.
Microslop and Oracle are already way down from their highs. Only Nvidia as the shovel seller still performs well.
People generally hate AI. The IPO price will be inflated and the stock will drop 10% on the first day, like many late stage IPOs in the 2000 bubble.
Friends and family like the Kushners will cash out. Trump might even suspend wars around the IPO date.
I'm going to guess $2.5 trillion which is about 2.5x their current valuation. I think the hype is going to be immense.
1. "Retail" does not have enough purchasing power to have all of these "bags" unloaded on to.
2. Institutions buy shares in public firms post-IPO all the time even when they're "unloading bags onto retail". Take Uber (random example) ~83% is owned by institutions.
3. General factual history of the stock market shows that you are incorrect. Successful companies that IPO and continue to do business still have quite a lot of room left to grow. What was Google's market capitalization at IPO? What is it now? Is it possible some early investors made higher multiples than the IPO -> May 20th valuation? Yea for sure. That doesn't mean that all the value was captured. It also doesn't take into account the early stage risk for investing. Is Google an "at this point IPO"? No, but the principle is the same.
It's also worth mentioning however that the number of IPOs is going down over time. You could maybe argue that the only ones that actually IPO are all the bags, but that seems like a stretch.
These cynical comments "IPOs are mainly for unloading bags on to retail" lack explanatory power and data.
A wise man once said: "if you're given an opportunity to cut an amazing deal and you can't tell who's getting screwed, then it's probably you"
0: https://pestakeholder.org/news/trump-admin-bails-out-private...
Institutions merely owning a newly-IPO'd stock means nothing. They get access to shares at a reasonable price before opening while retail is buying at insane prices after open. See Figma as an example where institutional investors got it at $33/share and it ended the IPO day at $115/share with retail buying all the way up (including pops above that at like $127)
I thought it was common knowledge that IPOs are a way for insiders and early investors (not IPO flippers) to get a nice exit during the frenzy.
scaling laws are a power law, you can only stay ahead for so long when each minor improvement gets exponentially more expensive
But it was a more facetious comment than I would have preferred to make, I actually went to delete it but you got in too quickly.
There are many reasons it's wrong, too, eg. at some level of risk debt becomes more expensive.
But the intent of the comment was to say that if you owned as sure a thing as the GP proposed you'd do what you could to avoid selling parts of it.
Probably not. Do you understand however that your comment does not make sense in the context of my comment?
> Institutions merely owning a newly-IPO'd stock means nothing. They get access to shares at a reasonable price before opening while retail is buying at insane prices after open. See Figma as an example where institutional investors got it at $33/share and it ended the IPO day at $115/share with retail buying all the way up (including pops above that at like $127)
It also doesn't mean nothing - you have to go and analyze any given stock to make these kinds of claims on a per-IPO/equity basis. You also are ignoring traders and trading algorithms run by... big institutions and trading firms, and you're not accounting for volume or accounting for post-IPO purchases nor breaking those down by segment. In other words, you're just making stuff up.
What is absolutely true? I'm not sure specifically what you are referring to.
> Just look at how private equity is now getting access to public markets and retirement accounts[0].
Nobody forces you to reallocate your Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund or wherever you have your retirement assets into a new Apollo fund.
Secondarily, we should treat people like adults and allow them to make their own investment decisions.
The thing I'm most worried about with SpaceX is bundling X.com, xAI with it. I don't want to invest in X.com nor xAI.
Lastly, I don't my money tied to the Elon rollercoaster.