Video: Opinion | Why the Anthropic and OpenAI I.P.O.s Are Unusual

Sophisticated investors in mass numbers who really, really do have skin in the game here are looking at these and saying they make sense. So when you say it’s just math, it’s clearly not just math, because everybody else can do math. It is your interpretation of the math. So where does your interpretation of the math differ from the market? Because — sure — so you have to think about why these kinds of I.P.O.s happen and why people are piling into them, going back to the very beginning, of “Why do I.P.O.s exist?” I.P.O.s used to exist to allow you to raise money for a company who needed to grow. These are not that, right? These companies have done their growing. They’re probably actually going to be — I don’t know — $100 billion in run rate revenues by the time they come out, or $70 billion or something like this. So these are exit events. These are people inside the company saying: I don’t need my stock anymore. You can have it. So they’re selling their stock to people on the outside because at this valuation, they’d rather have cash than Anthropic stock or cash than OpenAI stock. At that valuation, I’d like to have cash, too. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Hand it over. But the point being that this is not a gesture where they’re saying: I really like our prospects for the company. There’s going to be selling shareholders across the board, because this is an exit event, not a financing. But it is a gesture where other people are saying: I do like your prospects as a company, and I want to own this. The same thing was said in anticipation of the SpaceX I.P.O., and we’ve seen what happened subsequent to that — all of this fervor before it turned into a light roller coaster decline. So my expectation is you’ll see the exact same thing, because these are, in market terms, exit events. You’re going to be a wall of selling shareholders, showing up postlockup, selling it to anyone who’ll show up and want to take the shares from them. And that’s why this needs to be understood for what it is: an exit event. People are buying in anticipation of selling to you. If you want, it’s like the old line about the poker table: If don’t know who the greater fool at the table is, It’s you. This is that. And I don’t understand why people don’t see it that way, because that’s what makes this so unprecedented.