Apple has completely dropped the ball on every single detail of AI rollout for the last 5 years - why do you think they will suddenly stop now? My prior is that the new siri stuff is just as vaporware as the previous "apple intelligence" rollout

If you think Apple just sherlocked OpenAI, you havn't been paying attention to the pivot OpenAI has been doing for the last 7 months

Bubble has to burst at some point, so IPO now and at least get some exit liquidity. If you wait too long you’ll never be able to exit at all.

I think that’s the thought process and why they’re in such a rush. In fact all three are in a sort of race, you probably don’t want to be the last one to IPO

Like the TSLA bubble has burst?

That would make my portfolio’s day!

They need to financially engineer a good looking quarter beforehand.

Perhaps Larry Ellison can cut them a nice quid pro quo for a few months to make OpenAI look profitable (like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal), although that's probably unlikely given the debt Oracle is taking on to build it's infra.

Like financial reporting and "transparency" that's required for public companies.

Capital is going to dry up. All the AI companies are racing to get to market before the dumb money disappears

I personally think Elon is willing to take a hit on SpaceX's IPO Friday because he knows it will suck the air out of Sam's attempt at exiting.

Here is my low key prediction about the purchase of Cursor by Elon.

Cursor is purportedly a huge customer of OAI, maybe a top five? I think Elon bought it to have leverage on sama.

If timed correctly, Elon could pull the plug on a huge customer (Cursor) the quarter before OAI try to IPO.

Elon wanted precisely the same model.

that's not the issue, Elon is just a petulant child that is losing the ai game ever since he left OAI. Elon wanted full control, and that dispute over control is the central issue.

Elon is 100% a for profit person, it's just a 10 year rivalry between Sam and Elon.

I think it is intended to sound like Sam Altman. Would look exactly like a tweet of his if it didn't have capitalized characters.

I wish all announcements were this terse and candid

A very unserious tone from probably the most consequential company of our lifetimes. It's vibing all the way to the top I guess.

I looked it up:

  The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.

Maybe lay down some concrete numbers and timelines, hold yourself accountable, otherwise you risk confirmation bias with your predictions like millions before you.

> the market

Which market? The stock market? Or the tech stocks? Or something else?

So are you short the market?

Same. Glad I'm not alone.

implode as in? to the moon or crash into bits and pieces?

yep, same here.

I think that might not even happen depending on how SpaceX IPO goes.

Or just… Americans:

https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-blindsided-ai-compani...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea of turning over shares in his company to Trump in early 2025 and discussed the matter again with senior officials in recent weeks

Pretty much is, at this point. Spcx is oversubscribed.

You’re always someone’s exit liquidity.

From what I understand, SpaceX has been engineered such that all kinds of passive investment funds (pension funds, ETFs) will buy into it at their first rebalancing, and as such it should get a decent amount of volume after open.

Having said that, it’s the company I have least faith in due to the recent acquisition of xAI / Twitter.

So...all cash?

> When/how are IPO dates released?

Once the SEC declares a registration statement "effective," the company is subject to the Exchange Act's reporting requirements. Theoretically one can do this and not list one's shares. That's dumb, so nobody does it.

In practice, we'll get a couple weeks to possibly days ahead of the listing. That process is partly governed by the SEC accepting the company's S-1. It's mostly down to negotiations between the company, its underwriters and IPO investors.

This is the real reason. I don't think equity market has enough capital to support three companies of this size.

The numbers are public now, this is obviously false

While I agree on the smell I think that the situations are really different. I am not an economist but I think that other than the situation of the huge amount of money in play we are in a really different case. The general user (and I have noticed it especially with today's WWDC) basically doesn't get any benefit from AI (neither LLMs, image generation or photo editing). They were promised living like in Wall-e in 5 years and they are basically still living the same life. White collar jobs slightly benefited from the LLMs and same with programmers (while many say that they can get huge leverage the public results of what software companies produce didn't get the same benefit). Everyone knows the market will crash, nobody knows how much.

Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw

The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess.

But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Probably because they know there is a high chance of a big crash coming after.

I will not touch those IPOs with a 10 feet long pole. But unfortunately a lot of people are about to get burned.

My prediction is that this is what will be remembered as the last bit of exuberance before everything starts to unravel.

Books will be written about how insiders will be profiting millions by unloading those shares to the greatest fools and middle class america.

One of the stranger theories I have seen is that it is based on Astrology as there is a confluence of Uranus squaring the lunar nodes... whatever that means. There is a saying supposedly attributed to JP Morgan (but not likely) "Millionaires don't use astrology but Billionaires do."

One of the more rational ideas I have seen of any kind of divination is that it provides a means of passing judgement over to a near seemingly random system. If you are reading tea leaves, doing an 'I Ching' divination, biobliomancy etc. that essentially provides a coin flip to make you go 'yes' or 'no' to an opportunity.

There was a similar wave of IPOs with Uber and AirB&B, not tied to a bubble popping.

(I mean, I think this looks incredibly like a bubble too, but for completeness sake, that's the counterexample I can think of.)

The content of all these comments has a smell similar to 2023 when NVDA had a spectacular run and HN was absolutely sure that AI is a bubble.

It's also similar to 2024 when HN was sure that AI is a bubble.

Similar to 2025 when HN commentators were sure that AI is a bubble.

1000% gains later, HN will continue to identify patterns of 2000/2008 and are absolutely convinced it is a bubble

Note: If a company gains 1000% and loses 50%, you can't claim you were right.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have already gained 1000% since 2023 (In Anthropic's case almost 10,000%)

Got to payout the investors before the burst

Narcissist marketing, Sam loves it.

They expect someone to leak that they had submitted it, so they’re just saying it themselves. I don’t think they mean that the actual contents (like financial projections and all that) will be leaked.

Altman Gets his IPO

Well if you reverse OpenAI ... the first letter is I and the last two are P O...

Artificially Generated Internal-rate-of-Return

I was wondering about this the other week.

Is there a chart, somewhere, like a family tree, of what the Apple and Microsoft stock "ordinary millionaires" went on to do?

We had universal childcare until we converted single-income families into dual-income families in order to make the boomers who they bought houses from rich.

They're IPOing a commercial subsidiary of OpenAI so that it can donate even more money to the parent nonprofit.

(Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)

See: https://www.axios.com/2023/11/18/how-openai-board-is-structu... for the OpenAI Structure.

1) In order to fund research - this stuff costs 10s of billions of dollars - everyone, from Ilya, to Elon, to Sam - all agreed that they would require a profit-arm to raise money. Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit.

2) The non profit is still there - and controls the commercial element.

The nonprofit (OpenAI Foundation) owns ~26% of the for-profit, plus some extra warrants.

The for-profit (OpenAI Group PBC) is what's filing the S-1 Draft.

The OpenAI Foundation also exclusively appoints the board of the OpenAI Group PBC and can replace directors at any time.

https://openai.com/our-structure/

(I work at OpenAI, but I am not a lawyer and am not speaking on behalf of OpenAI - just sharing my personal understanding.)

Novo Nordisk

The corporation selling shares is just primarily owned by the non profit

The corporation selling shares is subject to normal corporate tax regime

The real answer to your question is that non profits can own shares, and there is no legal difference between passive investment of other publicly traded companies and highly consolidated shares of a private company. In the US it is seen as merely happenstance that we have such a liquid market where the shares themselves can rapidly change in value and create profits, but there is nothing controversial about that.

There is no point, it’s just government sanctioned virtue signaling

Why do you say this? It's OK to make such a bold statement, but you gotta share how you came to this conclusion. This helps with a good discussion.

> What's the point of a "confidential S-1"?

“Under the JOBS Act, it has been possible since April 2012 for ‘emerging growth companies’ to file a Form S-1 on a confidential basis, only making the contents public 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO” [1]. Since 2017 and 2025 it’s been available to basically all companies [2].

Withdrawing an IPO looks bad. Confidential filing lets issuers start and have the option to abort the process without taking reputational damage. (The specifics of OpenAI’s filing, and any back and forth with the SEC, remains confidential.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1

[2] https://www.sec.gov/about/divisions-offices/division-corpora...

Note the word "Draft".

Once it no longer is being drafted—and agreed upon by all parties to meet the needed regulatory standards—it will become final and be publicly published.

The SEC needs to review it before approving a company to go public at all. It’s targeted at investors but they need to clear it, ask questions, demand changes, etc.

Anthropic did exactly the same thing on June 1st: https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec

Also according to the Financial Times that this confidential filling gives employees who are considering to sell shares transparency.

I’m pretty sure they’re smart enough to remember to put “make no mistakes” in their prompt.

This makes no sense. Market cap and cash reserves are two different stats for a reason. Why would they need to be the same? Just to make things simpler for people who don't actually know what market cap means? (Which, granted, is the vast majority of people.)

This makes no sense: the whole point is to raise capital. The valuation is never just the current value of the assets; it’s based on the expected future cash flows. A good example is in biotech, some researcher developed a treatment and wants to develop a product. They have valuable IP but zero money. So they IPO to raise capital to bring the treatment to market. The investors expect that in the future, they will get dividends or a buyout.

If a company that wanted to IPO had 1 trillion dollars, their market cap would have to be larger than their cash holding. Their cash on hand is considered or at least should be considered in any normal valuation of the company. Because shares are ownership of the company.

So a simple valuation would be something like Current Cash + Assets + Expected Future cash - (Expenses + Risk)

Where would a company ever get their market cap in cash? If they had that, wouldn’t they by definition have a higher market cap, since the value of the company is cash + the rest of the company?

Companies always trade at a premium to book, so how would that work?

In theory the purpose of an IPO is to raise cash to expand a company. If the company already has the cash they don't need to do an IPO.

the marketcap represents the cashflow estimated by the market to be taken out of the business over the lifetime of the company discounted today.

your suggestion makes no sense

...what?