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.

What a headline

So, The Economist's paywall is unbypassable?

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.

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 :)

Net buying of corporate equities by American households, trusts, funds and non-profits has averaged $660bn per year for the last few years [1]. From a mechanical perspective, $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 26, 2023 to 2025

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.