OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic are worth hundreds of billions. If they IPO, will the stock market absorb them or choke? A dev's cynical take on the tech bubble.
Look, devs. We spend half our time fighting production bugs and the other half watching AI companies burn billions in compute just to make a chatbot sound slightly less robotic. Now, rumors are swirling that titans like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic might eventually go public. But here's the trillion-dollar question: Can the public stock market even absorb these absolute units, or will it just choke on them?
The Economist recently dropped a piece asking a very uncomfortable question. Right now, OpenAI is valued somewhere north of $80-90 billion. SpaceX blew past the $100 billion mark ages ago. Anthropic is sitting on tens of billions too.
Normally, these hyper-growth startups stay private, comfortably leeching off Venture Capitalists (VCs) and sugar daddies like Microsoft and Amazon. But VCs aren't charities; eventually, they want their exit liquidity. They need these giants to IPO so they can dump their bags... I mean, realize their gains.
The core issue? Public market liquidity isn't infinite. These companies bleed cash. Training LLMs requires an insane amount of GPUs, melting server farms on a daily basis. And rockets? Well, one explosion and there goes a cool $50 million. If they hit the public market, Wall Street suits will demand quarterly profits. Will regular retail investors and institutional funds have enough cash to swallow these massive valuations, or will it trigger a tech-wide market crash?
While the original Hacker News thread was surprisingly quiet (guess everyone was busy migrating to a new JS framework), the general tech community is basically split into a few very distinct, slightly toxic camps:
To wrap this up: Whether Wall Street chokes on these AI and space unicorns isn't our primary problem. Let the guys in Patagonia vests figure that out.
The real lesson for us? Don't get blinded by the FOMO. A company can have the most mind-bending, reality-altering tech stack, but if the unit economics are trash, it's just a house of cards waiting to fall.
Instead of daydreaming about scoring pre-IPO equity at a unicorn, keep your skills sharp. Grind that tech stack. Whether the AI bubble bursts or AGI takes over the world, someone still needs to fix the CSS and maintain legacy databases. Stay salty, and survive!
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