You forgot the part where NASDAQ already enacted a rule change that normally prohibits small floats from index inclusion (and thus forced purchase by index funds), which was normally 10% [1]. SpaceX is only floating ~4.3% of their stock and they're triple-weighting it.
Also worth asking what SpaceXLAI's plan is to make money. $22.7T of their $28.5T Total Addressable Market is... Drumroll... Enterprise AI! That's the plan, that's what we are investing in: spacex and Tesla and Twitter are all side shows, to sell AI. That's what everyone's absurdly overpriced forced passive investment is going to.
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mnan7hr2j...
There is nowhere near enough burning rage for this absurd fleecing if the public.
We don't let bubbles pop anymore. We print money and borrow from the future so that no one loses money on their homes and retirement accounts. The GFC changed the rules.
There is literally nothing creative about circumventing existing regulations. By definition of there already being rules in place to prevent them, the pump methods being used are already a known quantity. That those safeguards are being bypassed is just boring old corruption.
Irrational exuberance rarely transitions to a rational drawn down. The minute the first selfish-actor flood-liquidates, everyone else will too. That's now runs work.
Not related - many robber barons went bankrupt in the severe economic crashes of the time, such as the Panics of 1873 and 1893. The Gilded Age continued despite bubbles popping.
SpaceX used its massive IPO and listing fees (and the prestige of being the largest IPO ever) as leverage. Index providers and exchanges saw financial incentives: listing fees, trading volume, data sales, and long-term revenue from asset managers. Reuters reported that SpaceX advisers contacted major index providers (including Nasdaq) to discuss early index entry, and that SpaceX was leaning toward listing on Nasdaq only if it got early inclusion in the Nasdaq 100.
The rules built to protect passive investors were waived:
All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? What has gotten better other than the ability to produce more crap?
In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space.
In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.
Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).
I haven't found anything out of LLM's that has improved my life. It was a fun little toy but could never find a use case. But clearly, your mileage varies greatly from mine. That's cool.
I just personally don't the use in more when what I think many need is less. But that comes from essentially this point of view - “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha
Nominal global financial wealth is about $350 trillion. If you include real estate global nominal wealth is about $600 trillion.
A good portion of that[1] is what alot of people might call fake money--valuation inflation, etc. And global wealth, even just financial wealth, isn't quite as mobile across borders as one might assume. So marshalling a trillion dollars stateside is gonna make at least some moderate waves. Still, in the grand, global scheme of things a trillion dollars is a rounding error. A trillion isn't what it used to be, and there's trillions to be had even without any realized productivity gains from AI.
[1] I'm no financial analyst, but judging by the last few recessions and the overall trajectory over the past 30 years, I'd ballpark at most about 1/3 of that to go up in smoke if we had a severe downturn tomorrow. It's not all fake money. The whole world has industrialized over the past 30 years on a scale that is still unfathomable for most people today.
Try to keep perspective, these valuations are just functions of the stock market the end result of some spreadsheet. They have nothing to do with quality of life. Why would you relate those two things in the first place?
Raven, Raven.. that's for those who can borrow against that to know and you to likely never find out.
What you thought your life would improve? Didn't you hear, wages are only increasing, why don't you invest some of that sweet cash into @JumpCrissCross' fund, it'll be alright. What were you going to do with healthcare anyway?
I think this is the story of tech in general. In my life, I've seen 3 really big steps down for the middle class: 2001, 2008 and then covid. Basic necessities are expensive today - people point to high GDP but what I see is high prices and poverty. And Tech, we've built a dystopian surveillance state.
A shitshow for whom? I see it as extremely unlikely for the United States of America to not allow individuals to purchase things for whatever money they can pull together.
The only answer is to make it unacceptable socially, more costly economically (taxes, etc), or the third option which involves pitchforks (perhaps that also falls under "unacceptable socially") that I hope we can avoid at all costs. (is this the show you mention?)
Feels like folks used to understand the balance a bit better - but I think I made that up. This next governance cycle is going to be a trust-busting, wealth-confiscating one I think.
I think there will be a tremendous political opportunity in the next 6 months to capitalize on rage in cities against new tech wealth driving up housing costs.
> Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life?
I think these IPOs are going to mint tens of thousands of new millionaires or something. That, in turn, will generate massive tax windfalls for all levels of government.
> other than the ability to produce more crap?
This is a big "other than." (And to be clear, the jury is still out on whether AI will let us produce more in the long run.)
If jury is still out on positivity, long term, of AI, I'd really like to see arguments for that. Historically all - almost? - technical improvements were net positive; even some blunders had upside. AI is dangerous, yes, but e.g. fission was developed for the bomb, and now powers significant numbers of households worldwide - the tech less than 90 years old.
Anthropic at $1t for an IPO vs Google at $23b in 2004 sounds insane but Google's revenue at the time was $2.7b while Anthropic's already at $47b, so a valuation at about 20x vs 10x revenue. Anthropic also has very high revenue growth (50x since 2024), it doesn't seems quite as insane as it could be.
If you are growing revenue at a high rate then taking profit is a misallocation of resources. That is short-term thinking. It is much better to reinvest in revenue growth.
You can take small profit now or much larger profit later. Insisting that companies need to be profitable even when growing revenue rapidly is failing the marshmallow test.
What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video platforms, and so much more.
I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits
Anthropic seems to have clawed its way to being the best AI and charging for itself. Microsoft had to slash the Anthropic budget… which it exceeded while being the exclusive host of OpenAI.
Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead.
And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit.
I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.
Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.
The faster your cash loses value, the stronger your incentive to trade it for something else. That something else can be financial assets.
> It's not got loads to do with large-scale, institutional investments
For investors, particularly retail investors, the consumer price index is most relevant. But for whatever it's worth, producer prices are up over 16% in April (7% excluding "foods, energy, and trade services," which jumped over 50% annualized) [1].
To be clear, I'm floating a hypothesis here. I have seen no evidence linking inflation to demand for these companies' shares. (If anything, it should be the inverse.)
That depends. Inflation is a measure of the cost of living in terms of currency. It can be high either if goods and services required for living become scarce, or if currency supply increases. Currency supply increasing does affect asset prices.
Right now SPY not be such a great idea with SpaceX launch upcoming since it will be included into it immediately. Retail investors will be bearing that particular flop's cost.
I was old enough to remember the 08 crash. Then the market starting recovering in 2011/2012 and the sentiment was that the system would crash again soon like 08. Turns out, it was an amazing time to invest.
Post 08 crash, all sorts of conspiracy websites like Zero Hedge were popular saying how the world economy would keep crashing.
The only reason this happened was due to taxpayers bailing out financial institutions. This only exacerbated an insane amount of moral hazard already present in the market following previous bailouts.
Unfortunately, the US Government continued to run themselves into the ground spending-wise and may have a difficult time with another bailout, unless everyone pretty much agrees that we cannot have a USG failure, so they all pretend like nothing happened.
Eventually the merry-go-round stops, I'm just not sure what the catalyst will be, and it might be 100 years from now.
I am old enough to have had multiple career changes since starting on a major firm’s rates floor in 2008. These IPOs are tiny compared to the overall stock market and the stock market is absolutely tiny compared to debt markets. People consistently underestimate the size of the world economy or even their local economy. The world may look small from an orion capsule near the moon but almost every aspect of human society is bigger than most people can reason about. It is possible these IPOs have an outsized impact on sentiment for weird reasons. But it won’t be an actual outsized impact on capital markets.
Edit: I should add the AI bubble can absolutely burst but there is no reason to believe these IPOs are the end of the ride. If I knew I would be…
no one is going to get wealthy buying SPY/VOO. you might get rich, but not wealthy. things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”
while going with the tried&true makes some sense, I think we have to open our eyes to a different reality of our stock market… and this market concentration into few companies is going to get a lot worse…
> things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”
A small number of companies have always driven most stock-market gains. Betting on size isn't fundamentally a bad bet. But it is a bet against value and the historical tendency for small companies to be higher risk and higher reward.
you may be technically correct but today’s concentration in say top 10-15 companies is historic and by significant margin. I have been self-employed for a long time and somewhat “forced” into being “an investor” and starting in 2021-2022-ish I took my money out of all the “funds” … while I do not disagree that it is “a bet” - it is a calculated bet. things are different now even if historically you are right, no question
I very much disagree that it's coming. I think we need to completely reset our expectations of how the market works. There's been nearly an entire generation working in this "new" bull market, where things like EPS mean absolutely nothing and speculation no longer requires actual returns.
> the crash (that we all know is coming) will do that. Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up
Stock prices don't have to crash. They can just stagnate while profits catch up and multiples compress.
Debt binges, on the other hand, tend to go bust with a bang. But after the recent private-credit scare, the AI build-out has been predominantly financed with stock. (I think.)
Hasn't there been a _lot_ of debt to buy up Nvidia GPUs? I follow this stuff somewhat closely and it feels intentionally confusing, so I've likely lost track.
> Hasn't there been a _lot_ of debt to buy up Nvidia GPUs?
I believe that's been concentrated at the hyperscaler layer, and subsided when the aforementioned private-credit scare reared its head. (I haven't heard a big datacenter debt deal announced in a while. Though of course that doesn't mean they aren't being done.)
> Equity bubbles don't have to crash. Prices can just stagnate while profits catch up and multiples compress.
Is there is historical evidence for that? As someone who used to follow Jeremy Grantham a lot (he considered himself a "bubble historian"), IIRC every bubble he studied always mean reverted, and it usually (maybe always, can't remember) overshot on the downside during the correction.
> IIRC every bubble he studied always mean reverted
This really depends on how we're defining these things. Let's call a stock-market bubble a period of elevated multiples. That can mean revert by prices decreasing while earnings stay constant or by prices staying constant and earnings rising. (Alternatively, both earnings and multiples can rise and fall.)
Yes, for equity prices in particular he talks about P/E ratios (among some other metrics like corporate profit margins), and so you're right, it would be possible for this to mean revert by prices holding stagnant and earnings catching up. However, as far as I can remember (primarily because a big emphasis of his was how unchecked bubbles can cause a lot of damage on the downside) all the historical bubbles he studied (something like 50) always crashed with a big price drop. Not 100% sure though, which is why I was curious if you had any contrary examples.
Net buying of corporate equities by American households, trusts, funds and non-profits has averaged $660bn per year for the last few years [1]. $200bn is not fundamentally a stretch for the American equity markets, let alone capital markets more broadly.
30% above the average. Households bought $1.6 trillion in Q3 of 2025, for example. (Foreigners bought a further $650 and $700 billion in Q3 and Q4, respectively.)
> A third of all spending is not fundamentally a stretch?
Where did you get spending? That's net buying of stocks by non-financial Americans. It's the new money that has, on average, gone into the U.S. stock market from that section of investors every year. A third of it going into these new issuances doesn't need to break anything.
Dumb question here, but would it necessarily mean the other stocks they might've bought (i.e. the rest of the market) will not get the cash infusion and will thus likely drop in valuation?
> would it necessarily mean the other stocks they might've bought (i.e. the rest of the market) will not get the cash infusion and will thus likely drop in valuation?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Almost certainly, to some degree. But that doesn’t mean anything has to drop. Just not rise, or not rise as much as it would have. Or potentially some other company that would have gone public or sold shares doesn’t do it now.
So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops?
IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.
I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are predicting that the AI market is going to collapse. In fact, I think both are bullish that the public still isn't pricing in exponential growth.
I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.
Short term, nations with a high rate of white collar employment and fewer social services will suffer greatly.
Eventually, and likely in the lifetimes of most people living today, we would have to see something akin to universal basic income (UBI) that covers the necessities in order to stave off massive civil unrest.
If the white collar labor of human beings can’t compete with the output of AI, we either all become blue collar workers or we re-invent the concepts of work and play.
I’m not aware of any existing or proposed economy framework that adequately accounts for the automation that is nearly here at scale. We are not just automating away jobs - we are automating away the value that human beings have within a productive community. Before the mass starvation will come the mass suicide. Our culture teaches us that a feeling of self worth is derived from our perceived productivity. If we cannot feel successful, we may lose our wills to live.
I can’t imagine them actually being bullish about exponential growth, when both seem instead to be stagnating. I’m more inclined to believe they’re just maintaining a level of hype in public because that’s what you do.
They’ve claimed a big revenue run rate for this quarter. But it’s non-GAAP, so you kind of have to assume shenanigans. Earlier this year they were telling a court their revenue was like 1/4 of what they had told the public. I consider the number they came up with when they had to worry about committing perjury to be more trustworthy (because I’m a pill), so that would also indicate shenanigans. My guess is they are inflating that revenue run rate figure by booking token pre-payments from enterprise contracts now instead of spreading it over time as GAAP would mandate. And at the same time their big enterprise clients are talking about scaling back their usage.
So we’ve got a combination of signs that they’ve been inflating their revenue growth, and signs that their customers are losing their appetite for contributing to that revenue growth. I suppose it’s not a slam dunk, but it feels to me like as strong an indicator as one could hope for a private blitzscaler startup like this.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not saying there is evidence they're all a-okay. I just hadn't seen any evidence that they were stalling out. (I have for OpenAI.)
> Perhaps they’re afraid announcement would trigger divestment
S&P don't get a choice around whether they announce their methodology or not.
That said, the rule change at the NASDAQ 100 doesn't seem to have impacted pricing or allocation. I can't imagine that many people are that concerned about this. (I posted the public-comment request from S&P to HN [1]. The response was crickets.)
It's worse for the new investors. (If it crashes.) It's great for the old investors. They got an opportunity to sell if they wanted. If they didn't, they still own their shares, except in a company that has that IPO cash sitting in its account.
People keep predicting "house of cards" and keep being wrong. AI bubble was supposed to burst as far back as 2023. When was the last time since 2009 there was a $500+ billion tech valuation that lost 90% or more? After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.
The old saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
I’m not necessarily expecting a crash any time soon. (But we average a major correction, what? every 8 years? So if you keep predicting one long enough you will eventually have been right all along.) But I do feel comfortable saying OpenAI and Anthropic are overpriced. For more or less the same reason Cisco was overpriced in the late ‘90s. It’s not that what they were making wasn’t valuable; it’s that we got out over our skis a bit over how much of it the world could actually manage to consume in the immediate future.
> After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.
Groupon got to pretty much 100% penetration, still crashed and burned right after IPO. I think Zynga followed a similar trajectory.
> people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't
History is also replete with people constantly predicting collapses that don't come. Timing the market is very hard with numbers, it's total nonsense if one is just going off vibes.
Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI are not banks. (Also, we had the largest bank runs in American history three years ago. The ordinary American barely noticed.)
And these equity-investors, do they use their own money to buy the (presumably non-voting) stocks?
Cause if that's the case, I see no reason for a government bailout should things go south. Nobody's pension would be affected by some private investor losing money on a bad investment.
But if that's not the case, then someone somewhere along the chain is acting as a bank, subject to a vibe-driven run.
If note the dotcom boom lasted from about 1995 until 2000. Housing bubble longer. Theres no time table on when the bubble bursts, and the web didn’t die and neither did housing when the burst happened. It is just a reset and consolidation of overtly excessive speculation. It’s not like the bust leads to an end of civilization.
> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn
I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).
The $175T number is unfair because it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are. You might as well say the US is in infinite debt, because we'll always be paying something for our military every year, so infinity years * any dollars = infinite debt.
Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.
The NATO treaty says that we have to maintain our ability to resist armed attack, so there is some minimum. And we’ve made public commitments to spend at least 2% of GDP (though that isn’t part of the treaty).
SS and Medicare aren’t debts either in that sense. Congress can reduce benefits if they please.
In Flemming v. Nestor SCOTUS ruled that SS benefits are not guaranteed contractual rights but are instead statutory entitlements that Congress may modify or revoke.
Including all of the Social Security obligations for the current population is nonsense. For one it is money that will be paid from now for another ~60 years, and for 2 it's something that probably will just get cut as the trust fund starts getting into dire straits. It's not really an obligation if it's one act of congress away from being fixed (and without doing something like a debt jubilee that would destroy the dollar).
The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.
The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.
a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"
In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt
It goes beyond that. $175 trillion includes all future entitlement spending not debt, it’s crazy to call all future entitlement spending for every living person debt. By that metric there’s essentially no such thing as a solvent government anywhere in the world and there never has been in modern history.
Government debt isn't like personal debt or business debt. The treasury can choose to not honur it, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that, but wouldn't you say they already have enough?
No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.
As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.
Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.
The way I understand my money market settlement account at vanguard, is that it's all, or nearly all, treasuries. Treasury not honoring government debt would be the worst bank failure in the history of the world.
No doubt these companies are woefully overvalued. But this won’t stop me from putting in orders for several thousand dollars of shares with at market open. There will undoubtedly be plenty of buyers and I expect them to gain rapid entry into the indexes which will unlock a flood of additional capital from 401ks and pensions
I don't think the market will swallow the stock offerings until we see early signs of GDP growth attributable to these entities. But until then, I think the cost is higher than the benefit, which "The dead economy theory" essay covered it well [0]
> don't think the market will swallow the stock offerings until we see early signs of GDP growth attributable to these entities
Investors in these companies are going to be looking for revenue and pathway to profitability. I'm not sure anyone needs to see an impact on GDP to invest.
Can the stock market remain legitimate after such a brazen example of dumping? Regular everyday people can’t access private shares and participate in upside even if they want to. They don’t have the connections like VCs, and aren’t accredited investors. And companies ban secondary transactions, which should be forced by law to be always allowed.
And then after all that, the public have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up these overpriced stocks. You have a space company that also acquired a failing social media platform and failing AI company with little revenue justification for the valuation, and a lot of other obligations that make it financially a disaster (like payments owed for spectrum). And two frontier labs with no real moats, each looking for regulatory capture based on safety or ethics or whatever.
To the everyday person, the stock market after the fast listing rule, these three IPOs, and AI job loss, will feel no more legitimate than prediction markets or crypto.
> then they have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up overpriced stocks
Only about a third of American stocks are held by passive capital [1]. Out of that, index funds are about 16%, and most of those in America reference the S&P 500, which has not yet announced whether it is changing its rules.
Why wouldn't it? There huge demand for these shares. It's not like $3+ trillion is dumped at once. It's a tiny percentage of it, and the high multiple does the rest of the work.
How long have the SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic investors been waiting for an IPO (excluding tender offers)? 24 years, 10 years, and 5 years.
You really think they are going to hold off against selling for multi-millions for another year, especially SpaceX?
OpenAI (and especially) Anthropic are at risk from being undercut by the Chinese labs and their open-weight models and may cause their valuations to be questioned.
If that doesn't cause a correction, then SpaceX will do it for them. There is no lock up for the 5% of shares being available.
So what people seem to be unaware of or are purposely ignoring is that OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset. There was a HN post from a day or two ago where someone bought a V100 for 150 pounds and connected it to their computer. Well that was a $10k GPU in 2017. That's the fate of H100/B100 GPUs in 5-10 years (and I suspect closer to 5). What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years? I think it'll be worse than that because modern hardware at that time will still probably be the same Wattage but have much higher performance so you'll be getting much higher performance-per-Watt and that's going to really matter.
The only company I'm confident will survive this hardware crunch and still be relatively successful in this space is Google.
OpenAI in particular is a bet that there will be an AI moat and that OpenAI will "win". I don't think there will be a moat and China is a big reason why (eg DeepSeek).
SpaceX is a little different. Yes, launching rockets is a business but it's not a trillion dollar business. 100 Falcon 9 launches doesn't even break $10 billion in revenue. Plus, Starship faces cost overruns, delays and significant headwinds.
But the real kicker is that SpaceX was used to bail out Elon from the Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from the first Twitter bailout. That's a problem because xAI is burning $1 billion a month in a company where that really matters and I don't think Grok will "win" here. Like, at all. SpaceX would be a significantly more attractive company without xAI.
The big potential growth area is Starlink. For that to justify this valuation I think you need handheld Starlink phones. That requires a lot of satellites at a relatively low orbit, which also means they have a relatively short life (because they burn up in the atmosphere). And for that Starship must succeed.
All the AI data center in space stuff is complete bullshit. It makes no sense. It'll never be viable. It's not going to happen.
EDIT: let me clarify because I was careless in my wording. So, Anthropic individually has not spent "trillions". That was more of a general statement on AI spending. Anthropic has raised ~$100B, the last round of which was $65B (at $965B post-money IIRC). This industry as a whole needs to recoup trillions.
Anthropic seems to be in a better position (as a business) than OpeNAI is but I do think the it's a race to cash out before depreciating assets, well, drepreciate and there's the real risk as compute becomes cheaper and the AI craze wears off, Claude just may not have the growth trajectory that is built into the price.
As I was reading the start of your argument, I thought you were gonna call the models a depreciating asset! Totally agree about GPUs too, but literally everything they’re spending money on has to be rebuilt to stay competitive. They have to go for the moonshot of training a full new model when better tech comes, they have to upgrade GPUs to keep their data centers efficient.
"OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset".
Anthropic raised a bit over 100B and has 47B ARR. Where are you getting trillions from ?
Starlink Mobile (i.e. Starlink direct-to-cellphone without modifications) is already happening, and fast. Phones that have the recently announced Qualcomm X105 modem will support Starlink Mobile 5G at speeds up to 150Mbps, direct from satellite. The Qualcomm X105 modem will be in most Android flagship phones coming later this year, and by 2027 most new phones will support Starlink direct-to-cell. The next iPhone that supports the 3GPP Rel-19 standard will too.
The rollout relies on Starlink V3 sats, which can only be launched Starship, but Starship progress is going well and is already able to deploy satellites from orbit. SpaceX is capable of launching Starlink V3 on the current iteration of Starship, but they want more testing. We'll probably see Starlink V3 launching late this year or early next year.
For SpaceX (and possible the others):
Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.
From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065:
"Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO:
Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5.
This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.
Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months.
Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%.
The rules built to protect passive investors:
1. S&P 500 has required 12 months of trading and 4 quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both waived.
2. Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from 90 trading days to 15.
3. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.
All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing."
> All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing
S&P has not finalized a rule change yet.
Ill bet all the decision makers wives have suddenly come into some nice island property recently though
If you have evidence of corruption, present it. Otherwise it's just generic cynicism masquerading as arguments.
Do you think it’s more or less likely that they will make the same change as the other benchmarks?
Do you have a source for the $30 million claim? It'd be nice to work out the math. Not _all_ of 401k funds / index funds are going to go to SpaceX.
*trillion
yeah, trillion. 30m isn't even a vapor droplet.
You forgot the part where NASDAQ already enacted a rule change that normally prohibits small floats from index inclusion (and thus forced purchase by index funds), which was normally 10% [1]. SpaceX is only floating ~4.3% of their stock and they're triple-weighting it.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2026/04/25/spacex-...
Also worth asking what SpaceXLAI's plan is to make money. $22.7T of their $28.5T Total Addressable Market is... Drumroll... Enterprise AI! That's the plan, that's what we are investing in: spacex and Tesla and Twitter are all side shows, to sell AI. That's what everyone's absurdly overpriced forced passive investment is going to. https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mnan7hr2j...
There is nowhere near enough burning rage for this absurd fleecing if the public.
If this is a bubble... The pop stage will be devastating...
We don't let bubbles pop anymore. We print money and borrow from the future so that no one loses money on their homes and retirement accounts. The GFC changed the rules.
except the last bubble pop hit fast and hard with post covid inflation.
It’s bever going to happen because too many people want it to happen.
I mean if the blow back wasn't so horrible for a lot of people, I kind of respect just how creative the pump is on this one.
There is literally nothing creative about circumventing existing regulations. By definition of there already being rules in place to prevent them, the pump methods being used are already a known quantity. That those safeguards are being bypassed is just boring old corruption.
> If this is a bubble... The pop stage will be devastating...
Why? It could be sudden. It could be slow and gradual. I've seen no reason it needs to be one versus the other.
Irrational exuberance rarely transitions to a rational drawn down. The minute the first selfish-actor flood-liquidates, everyone else will too. That's now runs work.
Because it is deliberately extracting cash from Mom and Pop into the robber baron's wallets?
Okay? Why does that mean a devastating pop?
Where were you in 2008?
It would be karmic if fleecing led to financial crises. It doesn’t. You’ve taken N = 1 and extrapolated it wildly.
Why would that pop the bubble?
Robber Barrons existed from like 1860 through 1915 and extracted the wealth of many people, including Native American tribe lands.
Like this shit can keep going until we decide enough is enough and actually change our society.
Not related - many robber barons went bankrupt in the severe economic crashes of the time, such as the Panics of 1873 and 1893. The Gilded Age continued despite bubbles popping.
This is such a scam.
SpaceX used its massive IPO and listing fees (and the prestige of being the largest IPO ever) as leverage. Index providers and exchanges saw financial incentives: listing fees, trading volume, data sales, and long-term revenue from asset managers. Reuters reported that SpaceX advisers contacted major index providers (including Nasdaq) to discuss early index entry, and that SpaceX was leaning toward listing on Nasdaq only if it got early inclusion in the Nasdaq 100.
The rules built to protect passive investors were waived:
- S&P 500’s 12-month seasoning and 4-quarter GAAP profitability requirement → waived
- Nasdaq’s seasoning window (90 trading days) → cut to 15
- FTSE Russell’s seasoning window → cut to 5 days
Meanwhile, Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation (Musk holds approximately 42.5% of the equity, but commands roughly 83-85% of total voting control): https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/danish-pension-f...
> S&P 500’s 12-month seasoning and 4-quarter GAAP profitability requirement → waived
S&P hasn’t announced a final rule change yet.
All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? What has gotten better other than the ability to produce more crap?
In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space.
In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.
You'll overpay -- but not by trillions.
Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).
I suppose many do live in different worlds.
I haven't found anything out of LLM's that has improved my life. It was a fun little toy but could never find a use case. But clearly, your mileage varies greatly from mine. That's cool.
I just personally don't the use in more when what I think many need is less. But that comes from essentially this point of view - “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha
Nominal global financial wealth is about $350 trillion. If you include real estate global nominal wealth is about $600 trillion.
A good portion of that[1] is what alot of people might call fake money--valuation inflation, etc. And global wealth, even just financial wealth, isn't quite as mobile across borders as one might assume. So marshalling a trillion dollars stateside is gonna make at least some moderate waves. Still, in the grand, global scheme of things a trillion dollars is a rounding error. A trillion isn't what it used to be, and there's trillions to be had even without any realized productivity gains from AI.
[1] I'm no financial analyst, but judging by the last few recessions and the overall trajectory over the past 30 years, I'd ballpark at most about 1/3 of that to go up in smoke if we had a severe downturn tomorrow. It's not all fake money. The whole world has industrialized over the past 30 years on a scale that is still unfathomable for most people today.
Try to keep perspective, these valuations are just functions of the stock market the end result of some spreadsheet. They have nothing to do with quality of life. Why would you relate those two things in the first place?
Raven, Raven.. that's for those who can borrow against that to know and you to likely never find out.
What you thought your life would improve? Didn't you hear, wages are only increasing, why don't you invest some of that sweet cash into @JumpCrissCross' fund, it'll be alright. What were you going to do with healthcare anyway?
Meanwhile the federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
And how many earn this? Around 1% of hourly employees…if that. Not what I’d be concerned with right now.
Why not raise it then?
Why shouldn't we be concerned about it?
A society should be judged by how it treats those at the bottom and by that metric our current society is pretty awful.
I think this is the story of tech in general. In my life, I've seen 3 really big steps down for the middle class: 2001, 2008 and then covid. Basic necessities are expensive today - people point to high GDP but what I see is high prices and poverty. And Tech, we've built a dystopian surveillance state.
> Basic necessities are expensive
There is going to be a well-deserved shitshow when these IPO proceeds start hitting real estate markets.
A shitshow for whom? I see it as extremely unlikely for the United States of America to not allow individuals to purchase things for whatever money they can pull together.
The only answer is to make it unacceptable socially, more costly economically (taxes, etc), or the third option which involves pitchforks (perhaps that also falls under "unacceptable socially") that I hope we can avoid at all costs. (is this the show you mention?)
Feels like folks used to understand the balance a bit better - but I think I made that up. This next governance cycle is going to be a trust-busting, wealth-confiscating one I think.
> shitshow for whom?
I think there will be a tremendous political opportunity in the next 6 months to capitalize on rage in cities against new tech wealth driving up housing costs.
> Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life?
I think these IPOs are going to mint tens of thousands of new millionaires or something. That, in turn, will generate massive tax windfalls for all levels of government.
> other than the ability to produce more crap?
This is a big "other than." (And to be clear, the jury is still out on whether AI will let us produce more in the long run.)
If jury is still out on positivity, long term, of AI, I'd really like to see arguments for that. Historically all - almost? - technical improvements were net positive; even some blunders had upside. AI is dangerous, yes, but e.g. fission was developed for the bomb, and now powers significant numbers of households worldwide - the tech less than 90 years old.
> all - almost? - technical improvements were net positive
I think it’s very likely AI is a technical improvement. But there is still a chance it’s a small improvement being massively overbuilt.
It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a reverse funnel.
Anthropic at $1t for an IPO vs Google at $23b in 2004 sounds insane but Google's revenue at the time was $2.7b while Anthropic's already at $47b, so a valuation at about 20x vs 10x revenue. Anthropic also has very high revenue growth (50x since 2024), it doesn't seems quite as insane as it could be.
That is revenue. What is the net profit?
If you are growing revenue at a high rate then taking profit is a misallocation of resources. That is short-term thinking. It is much better to reinvest in revenue growth.
You can take small profit now or much larger profit later. Insisting that companies need to be profitable even when growing revenue rapidly is failing the marshmallow test.
They reported 559 million in Q2 of this year. OpenAI on the other hand, is nowhere near this.
What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video platforms, and so much more.
I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits
Anthropic seems to have clawed its way to being the best AI and charging for itself. Microsoft had to slash the Anthropic budget… which it exceeded while being the exclusive host of OpenAI.
Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead.
And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit.
I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.
Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.
Looks like it'll be more like $2t
https://polymarket.com/event/anthropic-ipo-closing-market-ca...
The way I've been thinking about it: there is too much money trying to pour into the market. That's why valuations are so high.
Maybe getting more of these big private companies public will bring valuations down a bit.
(Just my impression. No math or financial studies behind it :)
> there is too much money trying to pour into the market
Keep in mind that inflation ran over 7% annualized in April [1].
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
The vast majority of that was fuel.
From that doc, prices went up 0.6% in one month, multiple by 12 get 7.2% annual inflation rate.
Inflation is a measure of the cost of living. It's not got loads to do with large-scale, institutional investments.
> Inflation is a measure of the cost of living
The faster your cash loses value, the stronger your incentive to trade it for something else. That something else can be financial assets.
> It's not got loads to do with large-scale, institutional investments
For investors, particularly retail investors, the consumer price index is most relevant. But for whatever it's worth, producer prices are up over 16% in April (7% excluding "foods, energy, and trade services," which jumped over 50% annualized) [1].
To be clear, I'm floating a hypothesis here. I have seen no evidence linking inflation to demand for these companies' shares. (If anything, it should be the inverse.)
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ppi.nr0.htm
That depends. Inflation is a measure of the cost of living in terms of currency. It can be high either if goods and services required for living become scarce, or if currency supply increases. Currency supply increasing does affect asset prices.
Inflation then is already higher. Cost of living is driven mostly by rent
No, the crash (that we all know is coming) will do that. Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up
This is one of those "everyone who dies, breaths air" statements.
It's frustrating people who parrot it think they're smart by saying it to others with no basis and finally when it does happen they're like SEE SEE!?
> Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up
And this is the more important part. As long as you're <40 you SHOULD always buy SPY or VOO, even at the very top.
People have been saying the crash has been coming since 2022. If you believed this and acted on it, you would've missed 3-4 +10%/yr returns.
As Buffet says: You can't time the market; be in it.
It doesn’t seem Berkshire is that much in the market right now.
Just to add some color using real numbers: Berkshire's Q1 cash pile was $397.4 billion, which is nearly 60% of its investable assets.
Right now SPY not be such a great idea with SpaceX launch upcoming since it will be included into it immediately. Retail investors will be bearing that particular flop's cost.
> SPY not be such a great idea with SpaceX launch upcoming since it will be included into it immediately
S&P has not announced a methodology change yet.
They haven't approved a change, but they have released proposals, which are tentatively to go into effect on June 8:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announ...
I was old enough to remember the 08 crash. Then the market starting recovering in 2011/2012 and the sentiment was that the system would crash again soon like 08. Turns out, it was an amazing time to invest.
Post 08 crash, all sorts of conspiracy websites like Zero Hedge were popular saying how the world economy would keep crashing.
The only reason this happened was due to taxpayers bailing out financial institutions. This only exacerbated an insane amount of moral hazard already present in the market following previous bailouts.
Unfortunately, the US Government continued to run themselves into the ground spending-wise and may have a difficult time with another bailout, unless everyone pretty much agrees that we cannot have a USG failure, so they all pretend like nothing happened.
Eventually the merry-go-round stops, I'm just not sure what the catalyst will be, and it might be 100 years from now.
Without massive government intervention it probably would have
I am old enough to have had multiple career changes since starting on a major firm’s rates floor in 2008. These IPOs are tiny compared to the overall stock market and the stock market is absolutely tiny compared to debt markets. People consistently underestimate the size of the world economy or even their local economy. The world may look small from an orion capsule near the moon but almost every aspect of human society is bigger than most people can reason about. It is possible these IPOs have an outsized impact on sentiment for weird reasons. But it won’t be an actual outsized impact on capital markets.
Edit: I should add the AI bubble can absolutely burst but there is no reason to believe these IPOs are the end of the ride. If I knew I would be…
no one is going to get wealthy buying SPY/VOO. you might get rich, but not wealthy. things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”
while going with the tried&true makes some sense, I think we have to open our eyes to a different reality of our stock market… and this market concentration into few companies is going to get a lot worse…
> things have changed now in a sense that handful of companies are large percentage of the stock market to the point where one has to question why invest in “s&p 500” vs “s&p 25-ish”
A small number of companies have always driven most stock-market gains. Betting on size isn't fundamentally a bad bet. But it is a bet against value and the historical tendency for small companies to be higher risk and higher reward.
you may be technically correct but today’s concentration in say top 10-15 companies is historic and by significant margin. I have been self-employed for a long time and somewhat “forced” into being “an investor” and starting in 2021-2022-ish I took my money out of all the “funds” … while I do not disagree that it is “a bet” - it is a calculated bet. things are different now even if historically you are right, no question
One of my favorite phrases is “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
Even if all signs point to impending doom, at the end of the day if people are still buying, stocks will hold their value.
I very much disagree that it's coming. I think we need to completely reset our expectations of how the market works. There's been nearly an entire generation working in this "new" bull market, where things like EPS mean absolutely nothing and speculation no longer requires actual returns.
>I think we need to completely reset our expectations of how the market works.
Is this not just "It's different this time" thinking? I remember it being used all the time during the dotcom boom
> There's been nearly an entire generation working in this "new" bull market
You mean 0DTE babies?
> the crash (that we all know is coming) will do that. Until then, history teaches that we'll just keep going up and up
Stock prices don't have to crash. They can just stagnate while profits catch up and multiples compress.
Debt binges, on the other hand, tend to go bust with a bang. But after the recent private-credit scare, the AI build-out has been predominantly financed with stock. (I think.)
Hasn't there been a _lot_ of debt to buy up Nvidia GPUs? I follow this stuff somewhat closely and it feels intentionally confusing, so I've likely lost track.
> Hasn't there been a _lot_ of debt to buy up Nvidia GPUs?
I believe that's been concentrated at the hyperscaler layer, and subsided when the aforementioned private-credit scare reared its head. (I haven't heard a big datacenter debt deal announced in a while. Though of course that doesn't mean they aren't being done.)
And we're still extremely compute constrained. We need more Nvidia GPUs, RAM, power.
> Equity bubbles don't have to crash. Prices can just stagnate while profits catch up and multiples compress.
Is there is historical evidence for that? As someone who used to follow Jeremy Grantham a lot (he considered himself a "bubble historian"), IIRC every bubble he studied always mean reverted, and it usually (maybe always, can't remember) overshot on the downside during the correction.
> IIRC every bubble he studied always mean reverted
This really depends on how we're defining these things. Let's call a stock-market bubble a period of elevated multiples. That can mean revert by prices decreasing while earnings stay constant or by prices staying constant and earnings rising. (Alternatively, both earnings and multiples can rise and fall.)
Yes, for equity prices in particular he talks about P/E ratios (among some other metrics like corporate profit margins), and so you're right, it would be possible for this to mean revert by prices holding stagnant and earnings catching up. However, as far as I can remember (primarily because a big emphasis of his was how unchecked bubbles can cause a lot of damage on the downside) all the historical bubbles he studied (something like 50) always crashed with a big price drop. Not 100% sure though, which is why I was curious if you had any contrary examples.
There is nowhere else for that money to go
Net buying of corporate equities by American households, trusts, funds and non-profits has averaged $660bn per year for the last few years [1]. $200bn is not fundamentally a stretch for the American equity markets, let alone capital markets more broadly.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20260319/html/f22... line 16, 2023 to 2025
A 30% increase in one year, across only 3 companies, seems like a of a stretch. Especially given current economic/etc climates.
> 30% increase in one year
30% above the average. Households bought $1.6 trillion in Q3 of 2025, for example. (Foreigners bought a further $650 and $700 billion in Q3 and Q4, respectively.)
American capital markets are ridiculously deep.
A third of all spending is not fundamentally a stretch?
> A third of all spending is not fundamentally a stretch?
Where did you get spending? That's net buying of stocks by non-financial Americans. It's the new money that has, on average, gone into the U.S. stock market from that section of investors every year. A third of it going into these new issuances doesn't need to break anything.
Dumb question here, but would it necessarily mean the other stocks they might've bought (i.e. the rest of the market) will not get the cash infusion and will thus likely drop in valuation?
> would it necessarily mean the other stocks they might've bought (i.e. the rest of the market) will not get the cash infusion and will thus likely drop in valuation?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Almost certainly, to some degree. But that doesn’t mean anything has to drop. Just not rise, or not rise as much as it would have. Or potentially some other company that would have gone public or sold shares doesn’t do it now.
So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops?
IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.
I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are predicting that the AI market is going to collapse. In fact, I think both are bullish that the public still isn't pricing in exponential growth.
I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.
What are they offering the public (not me and you writing code in our free time)?
They are offering the public an opportunity to become shareholders and they are giving their investors and employees liquidity.
I mean as a long-term product, not as a offer to join a hype cycle.
Automating a large portion of existing white collar work, accelerating scientific discoveries, brain for robotics, etc. These are compelling offers.
Sure, how does that benefit the public?
Short term, nations with a high rate of white collar employment and fewer social services will suffer greatly.
Eventually, and likely in the lifetimes of most people living today, we would have to see something akin to universal basic income (UBI) that covers the necessities in order to stave off massive civil unrest.
If the white collar labor of human beings can’t compete with the output of AI, we either all become blue collar workers or we re-invent the concepts of work and play.
I’m not aware of any existing or proposed economy framework that adequately accounts for the automation that is nearly here at scale. We are not just automating away jobs - we are automating away the value that human beings have within a productive community. Before the mass starvation will come the mass suicide. Our culture teaches us that a feeling of self worth is derived from our perceived productivity. If we cannot feel successful, we may lose our wills to live.
I don't know. Some will benefit, some will not. The topic here is the IPOs.
What have the Romans ever do for us?!
I can’t imagine them actually being bullish about exponential growth, when both seem instead to be stagnating. I’m more inclined to believe they’re just maintaining a level of hype in public because that’s what you do.
> when both seem instead to be stagnating
What's the evidence for Anthropic stagnating?
They’ve claimed a big revenue run rate for this quarter. But it’s non-GAAP, so you kind of have to assume shenanigans. Earlier this year they were telling a court their revenue was like 1/4 of what they had told the public. I consider the number they came up with when they had to worry about committing perjury to be more trustworthy (because I’m a pill), so that would also indicate shenanigans. My guess is they are inflating that revenue run rate figure by booking token pre-payments from enterprise contracts now instead of spreading it over time as GAAP would mandate. And at the same time their big enterprise clients are talking about scaling back their usage.
So we’ve got a combination of signs that they’ve been inflating their revenue growth, and signs that their customers are losing their appetite for contributing to that revenue growth. I suppose it’s not a slam dunk, but it feels to me like as strong an indicator as one could hope for a private blitzscaler startup like this.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not saying there is evidence they're all a-okay. I just hadn't seen any evidence that they were stalling out. (I have for OpenAI.)
The same evidence that they are growing. Tea leaves.
"I think both are bullish that the public still isn't pricing in exponential growth."
So youre saying they will both become the economy whilst Google, Apple et al let them?
Man the idiotic statements on here are insane. Why do you fools pretend to know a subject well enough to spout such nonsense?
> youre saying they will both become the economy
They said exponential and you read unlimited.
The only reason I can think of for the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX is a pump and dump
> the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX
To be clear, S&P hasn't announced a decision on this yet.
Perhaps they’re afraid announcement would trigger divestment
> Perhaps they’re afraid announcement would trigger divestment
S&P don't get a choice around whether they announce their methodology or not.
That said, the rule change at the NASDAQ 100 doesn't seem to have impacted pricing or allocation. I can't imagine that many people are that concerned about this. (I posted the public-comment request from S&P to HN [1]. The response was crickets.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054324
Better for whom?
The company. Worse for the investors. It's a classic bagholder play, but it can give the companies a comfortable runway post IPO.
Typically, you IPO when your private funding is drying up and/or some of your early lenders want to cash out.
> The company. Worse for the investors
It's worse for the new investors. (If it crashes.) It's great for the old investors. They got an opportunity to sell if they wanted. If they didn't, they still own their shares, except in a company that has that IPO cash sitting in its account.
Yes, correct. Although, even for some company folks, if it crashes, they get burned since they typically have blackouts post IPO.
Of course, some special souls are excluded from blackouts lol.
> if it crashes, they get burned since they typically have blackouts post IPO
In the alternate timeline they would have held shares in a private company. They're still not really getting burned other than getting a tax bill.
People keep predicting "house of cards" and keep being wrong. AI bubble was supposed to burst as far back as 2023. When was the last time since 2009 there was a $500+ billion tech valuation that lost 90% or more? After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.
The old saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
I’m not necessarily expecting a crash any time soon. (But we average a major correction, what? every 8 years? So if you keep predicting one long enough you will eventually have been right all along.) But I do feel comfortable saying OpenAI and Anthropic are overpriced. For more or less the same reason Cisco was overpriced in the late ‘90s. It’s not that what they were making wasn’t valuable; it’s that we got out over our skis a bit over how much of it the world could actually manage to consume in the immediate future.
> After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.
Groupon got to pretty much 100% penetration, still crashed and burned right after IPO. I think Zynga followed a similar trajectory.
Read history: people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't.
This is one of those arguments that is so vacuous you can apply it to anything and always be right.
> "There's no way you'll hurt yourself walking to the living room"
> "Read history: people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't."
And people are right most of the time. For every actual bubble, there are easily a dozen "bubbles" that aren't in fact bubbles.
Nasdaq is 5.4x higher now than peak dotcom.
So just buy the dip if it actually crashes.
> people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't
History is also replete with people constantly predicting collapses that don't come. Timing the market is very hard with numbers, it's total nonsense if one is just going off vibes.
Most bank runs tend to be driven by vibes, not numbers though.
The good news is that these folks seem to be in possession of a vibe-rator.
> bank runs
Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI are not banks. (Also, we had the largest bank runs in American history three years ago. The ordinary American barely noticed.)
They're not profitable either, so the money has to come from somewhere, no?
> the money has to come from somewhere, no?
Yes. Equity investors. The ones who buy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of American stocks a quarter.
And these equity-investors, do they use their own money to buy the (presumably non-voting) stocks?
Cause if that's the case, I see no reason for a government bailout should things go south. Nobody's pension would be affected by some private investor losing money on a bad investment.
But if that's not the case, then someone somewhere along the chain is acting as a bank, subject to a vibe-driven run.
If note the dotcom boom lasted from about 1995 until 2000. Housing bubble longer. Theres no time table on when the bubble bursts, and the web didn’t die and neither did housing when the burst happened. It is just a reset and consolidation of overtly excessive speculation. It’s not like the bust leads to an end of civilization.
In 2004 people were predicting that the real estate bubble would burst and then nothing happened. Until it did.
> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn
I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).
[0] https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem
The $175T number is unfair because it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are. You might as well say the US is in infinite debt, because we'll always be paying something for our military every year, so infinity years * any dollars = infinite debt.
Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.
> it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are
It's a liability because the U.S. has promised to pay it. We haven't committed to a level of military spending backed by our full faith and credit.
EDIT: Never mind! Apparently we can just cut social security payments.
The NATO treaty says that we have to maintain our ability to resist armed attack, so there is some minimum. And we’ve made public commitments to spend at least 2% of GDP (though that isn’t part of the treaty).
Neither of those are full faith and credit guarantees. Congress can nullify them in a way it Constitutionally cannot actual debts.
SS and Medicare aren’t debts either in that sense. Congress can reduce benefits if they please.
In Flemming v. Nestor SCOTUS ruled that SS benefits are not guaranteed contractual rights but are instead statutory entitlements that Congress may modify or revoke.
Including all of the Social Security obligations for the current population is nonsense. For one it is money that will be paid from now for another ~60 years, and for 2 it's something that probably will just get cut as the trust fund starts getting into dire straits. It's not really an obligation if it's one act of congress away from being fixed (and without doing something like a debt jubilee that would destroy the dollar).
The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.
The thing is that at these levels of debt, repayment is never the goal.
Well, will be interesting to see how this play out. The US federal debt repayments is already above $1trillion a year.
How can you use a word like “never” when this debt is literally unprecedented in the history of the world
It can never be repaid. Presumably the people in charge of generating it are not oblivious to this fact.
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
It goes beyond that. $175 trillion includes all future entitlement spending not debt, it’s crazy to call all future entitlement spending for every living person debt. By that metric there’s essentially no such thing as a solvent government anywhere in the world and there never has been in modern history.
Government debt isn't like personal debt or business debt. The treasury can choose to not honur it, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that, but wouldn't you say they already have enough?
No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.
As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.
Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.
The way I understand my money market settlement account at vanguard, is that it's all, or nearly all, treasuries. Treasury not honoring government debt would be the worst bank failure in the history of the world.
> Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that
Argentina is doing fine. The real constraint would be that defaulting on the debt would cause a credit crisis and bank collapses.
Pretty sure this is why the bankruptcy guy from NY was sent in
We also don’t have anywhere near $175 trillion in debt. That’s a crazy made up number.
...what does this have to do with these IPOs?
No doubt these companies are woefully overvalued. But this won’t stop me from putting in orders for several thousand dollars of shares with at market open. There will undoubtedly be plenty of buyers and I expect them to gain rapid entry into the indexes which will unlock a flood of additional capital from 401ks and pensions
I don't think the market will swallow the stock offerings until we see early signs of GDP growth attributable to these entities. But until then, I think the cost is higher than the benefit, which "The dead economy theory" essay covered it well [0]
[0]: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
> don't think the market will swallow the stock offerings until we see early signs of GDP growth attributable to these entities
Investors in these companies are going to be looking for revenue and pathway to profitability. I'm not sure anyone needs to see an impact on GDP to invest.
Feels more like: can the bond market handle any potential outflows as money is rotated into these IPOs?
> can the bond market handle any potential outflows as money is rotated into these IPOs?
Yes. Even if this capital is just rotated out of the equity markets, it would be fine. The bond markets are orders of magnitude deeper.
What a headline
Can the stock market remain legitimate after such a brazen example of dumping? Regular everyday people can’t access private shares and participate in upside even if they want to. They don’t have the connections like VCs, and aren’t accredited investors. And companies ban secondary transactions, which should be forced by law to be always allowed.
And then after all that, the public have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up these overpriced stocks. You have a space company that also acquired a failing social media platform and failing AI company with little revenue justification for the valuation, and a lot of other obligations that make it financially a disaster (like payments owed for spectrum). And two frontier labs with no real moats, each looking for regulatory capture based on safety or ethics or whatever.
To the everyday person, the stock market after the fast listing rule, these three IPOs, and AI job loss, will feel no more legitimate than prediction markets or crypto.
> then they have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up overpriced stocks
Only about a third of American stocks are held by passive capital [1]. Out of that, index funds are about 16%, and most of those in America reference the S&P 500, which has not yet announced whether it is changing its rules.
[1] https://alexchinco.com/double-what-you-think-it-is.pdf
Why wouldn't it? There huge demand for these shares. It's not like $3+ trillion is dumped at once. It's a tiny percentage of it, and the high multiple does the rest of the work.
There was a huge demand for the World Online IPO in The Netherlands in the late 2000 bubble. Retail investors bought it thinking they got a unicorn.
Turns out it was a scam and shares fell on the first day. Soon after the entire bubble burst.
That said, I don't even see "huge demand" for the AI triocorns right now. Unlike in 2000, most people are skeptical.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is adding ~$10-$15b ARR every month.
I personally think there is massive demand. I think Anthropic will easily eclipse $2 trillion marketcap on first day of trading.How long have the SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic investors been waiting for an IPO (excluding tender offers)? 24 years, 10 years, and 5 years.
You really think they are going to hold off against selling for multi-millions for another year, especially SpaceX?
OpenAI (and especially) Anthropic are at risk from being undercut by the Chinese labs and their open-weight models and may cause their valuations to be questioned.
If that doesn't cause a correction, then SpaceX will do it for them. There is no lock up for the 5% of shares being available.
So what people seem to be unaware of or are purposely ignoring is that OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset. There was a HN post from a day or two ago where someone bought a V100 for 150 pounds and connected it to their computer. Well that was a $10k GPU in 2017. That's the fate of H100/B100 GPUs in 5-10 years (and I suspect closer to 5). What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years? I think it'll be worse than that because modern hardware at that time will still probably be the same Wattage but have much higher performance so you'll be getting much higher performance-per-Watt and that's going to really matter.
The only company I'm confident will survive this hardware crunch and still be relatively successful in this space is Google.
OpenAI in particular is a bet that there will be an AI moat and that OpenAI will "win". I don't think there will be a moat and China is a big reason why (eg DeepSeek).
SpaceX is a little different. Yes, launching rockets is a business but it's not a trillion dollar business. 100 Falcon 9 launches doesn't even break $10 billion in revenue. Plus, Starship faces cost overruns, delays and significant headwinds.
But the real kicker is that SpaceX was used to bail out Elon from the Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from the first Twitter bailout. That's a problem because xAI is burning $1 billion a month in a company where that really matters and I don't think Grok will "win" here. Like, at all. SpaceX would be a significantly more attractive company without xAI.
The big potential growth area is Starlink. For that to justify this valuation I think you need handheld Starlink phones. That requires a lot of satellites at a relatively low orbit, which also means they have a relatively short life (because they burn up in the atmosphere). And for that Starship must succeed.
All the AI data center in space stuff is complete bullshit. It makes no sense. It'll never be viable. It's not going to happen.
EDIT: let me clarify because I was careless in my wording. So, Anthropic individually has not spent "trillions". That was more of a general statement on AI spending. Anthropic has raised ~$100B, the last round of which was $65B (at $965B post-money IIRC). This industry as a whole needs to recoup trillions.
Anthropic seems to be in a better position (as a business) than OpeNAI is but I do think the it's a race to cash out before depreciating assets, well, drepreciate and there's the real risk as compute becomes cheaper and the AI craze wears off, Claude just may not have the growth trajectory that is built into the price.
As I was reading the start of your argument, I thought you were gonna call the models a depreciating asset! Totally agree about GPUs too, but literally everything they’re spending money on has to be rebuilt to stay competitive. They have to go for the moonshot of training a full new model when better tech comes, they have to upgrade GPUs to keep their data centers efficient.
> What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years?
I think the aim would be to generate at least $900bn of cash flow from those assets.
"OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset". Anthropic raised a bit over 100B and has 47B ARR. Where are you getting trillions from ?
Starlink Mobile (i.e. Starlink direct-to-cellphone without modifications) is already happening, and fast. Phones that have the recently announced Qualcomm X105 modem will support Starlink Mobile 5G at speeds up to 150Mbps, direct from satellite. The Qualcomm X105 modem will be in most Android flagship phones coming later this year, and by 2027 most new phones will support Starlink direct-to-cell. The next iPhone that supports the 3GPP Rel-19 standard will too.
The rollout relies on Starlink V3 sats, which can only be launched Starship, but Starship progress is going well and is already able to deploy satellites from orbit. SpaceX is capable of launching Starlink V3 on the current iteration of Starship, but they want more testing. We'll probably see Starlink V3 launching late this year or early next year.
Source on the trillions invested?
So, The Economist's paywall is unbypassable?
Download the Bypass Paywalls Clean browser extension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean
The project has been going on for years, it moved to gitflic after being banned from github and gitlab.
Amazing! Thank you!