Money is Running Out for the Biggest IPOs in History

0:00 Three of the largest IPOs in history are filing within weeks of each other. We have SpaceX, OpenAI, and as of just this week, Anthropic. [music] And on that same day, Google raised $80 billion of outside capital to fund its own AI buildout. Now, the interesting part here is they're partly funded by each other's money. Everyone is contributing to the other person's balance sheets. And we've even gone so far as in the last few weeks to change the rules protecting [music] passive investors about how they can invest in IPOs. the biggest buildout in the history of capitalism is currently happening and we have to ask the question is there enough money like clearly there's a reason there's correlation as to why each one of these companies are choosing to go public all around the same time and this chart that we're sharing on screen here is pretty incredible I mean between openai anthropic and spex the total amount raised during IPOs is going to be $180 billion that's more than the entire dot bubble combined at $164 billion that's 3 years versus three IPOs. So, the scale of this is huge. And I mean, we have to answer a few questions. Is this a circular economy moment? Are they running out of money? Have they outgrown private capital? There's a lot to talk about here. Ez, I guess starting with SpaceX. Yeah. So, you've got SpaceX, Open Air, Anthropic, they're having blockbuster IPOs, but the story isn't really about like each of them individually. It's the fact that they're all happening potentially within weeks of each other. They're all targeting like by latest a Q4 IPO and the combined raise is is absolutely massive. We haven't seen anything like this before.

1:31 So, um if we break down like what we've seen so far, we had uh SpaceX, I think it was April 1st that filed for their S1, which basically is their proclamation that they intend to IPO. I think they're targeting around um an IPO sometime either this month or at least early July. That's what the rumors are saying right now. Uh, and then 10 days ago, we had OpenAI reportedly confidentially file their own S1 for their own IPO. And then 10 days later, aka yesterday, um, Anthropic filed for, uh, their confidential S1, which means that now all three of these companies are going for Blockbuster IPOs within potentially weeks of each other. And so it begs the question, why is this happening now? Why such a rush? Um, the answer to me is pretty simple. The AI Capex buildout is becoming costlier than any of these companies could have expected and they've decided to lean in.

2:23 They've run out of free cash flow. Up until this point, all of these companies have spent private money, money that they've raised from investors or earn themselves through revenue. And now they're turning to the public and saying, "We need more money to build out more data centers and GPU so that we can train these models and facilitate all the demand that we're seeing." Now if you talk to each of these companies, none of them say that um there is no demand on their side. Um Google and I believe uh Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have all reported profitable quarters through all their AI capex expenditure.

2:56 I think combined actually those four companies were aiming to spend around $1 trillion this year but it's not enough and so they need more money to kind of like fund all of this thing. Um the criticism that comes to me is like I don't know whether this is the point of no return. And we were chatting about this before we started recording where um there's no going back after this. We are jumping into the abbis and whether we're going to lever up through debt instruments or whatever that might be.

3:20 Uh there is no returning from this. It is all in or nothing. >> Well, the thing I find most interesting is it's not just the companies that are going allin. It's the institutions and it's the public and it is pretty much everyone who's going allin. So much so that the largest funds on Wall Street that actually host these IPOs are changing the rules just to accommodate them. This most recent one happened around the SpaceX IPO where index providers they waved their profitability requirements and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to five. Basically what that means is a company needed to prove that it was a viable company that could be traded publicly before index funds were required to buy it. Now those index funds can buy it a lot sooner. So, a lot of people who might not want to be investing in SpaceX, their retirement funds, their 401ks, the indexes that hold it, are going to be able to invest a lot faster than they normally otherwise would have been. Yeah, this has never happened before. So, SpaceX is effectively changing the rules of the IPO market in order to facilitate the massive raise that they're going for.

4:22 So, um, a few sentences here that caught my eye. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k, so retirement fund money to buy SpaceX. it's forcing them to buy it at IPO valuation. So it roughly means that around 24% of SpaceX's IPO supply of shares is going to be absorbed through these passive funds. We've never seen anything like that before. Secondly, typically if you want to get included in uh indexes, prestigious indexes such as the NASDAQ 100 or the Fortune 500, you need to one demonstrate that you're earning a ton of revenue and two demonstrate that for I think it was like one or two successive quarters. So, we're talking about like 3 to 6 months.

5:02 All of those rules are being waved to days. We're talking like 5 to 15 days for two separate different indexes that are saying, "Okay, listen. If you can prove that the uh IPO price trades above a certain price for this amount, we'll include you in the index. Don't worry, we'll forget about it and we'll get all these pension funds to purchase or buy your stock. So, Elon basically needs to keep the stock price up for above a certain level and he's good to go."

5:25 Well, it's a little concerning because like for for decades these big indexes, they've had two rules specifically designed to protect ordinary people who just have investment accounts, retirement accounts, and those two rules were like you mentioned, one of them was it was four straight quarters of profit. And then the other was a minimum float of 5 to 10%. And actually those were implemented because of the fallout from the dot crash in 1999 to 2000. indexes took a bunch of the super high growth cash losing companies near the top and that means that 401k holders or retirees they were also holding those companies and held kept holding the bag. So after they got crushed in the bubble burnout, what happened was is that they implemented these rules. Now it feels like we're having dja vu. The rules are getting reversed again. So now you don't actually need to have four straight quarters of gap profit. You just need to have I believe it's 15 days. So it's like a pretty considerable decrease in the parameters required to allow these index funds to invest. And it's like history doesn't repeat, but it certainly does rhyme. And it seems like the last time we did this, it wasn't good. Now we're kind of reverting back to those terms. That seems a little bit concerning to me at least. So that's to be noted. I think it's probably good for the price, right? It's like there's so much buying pressure that's going to be pushing SpaceX up, but the downstream effects of it not going as well as planned are going to hurt some people who might not want to be buying SpaceX shares in the first place. You know, Josh, I think the main criticism of the SpaceX IPO, and I think honestly a lot of it is justifiable, is they just haven't proven the revenue model. just yet. They're saying like, "Hey, we'll launch AI data centers in space. We'll do it on our rockets." But they haven't like proven that model, at least even at like a proof of concept right now. Like they're launching space rockets up there, but like we don't have GPUs in space that are currently training frontier models. So it's still kind of like trust me, bro, in a sense. Um, now one company that has proven a lot of revenue and has gone on the craziest story arc is Anthropic. and yesterday they filed for a draft S1 uh registration statement of the SEC which basically states that they plan to IPO in the coming months. Now >> the story is very different with Anthropic in a few different ways. Uh Josh, if you remember at the end of last year we did an episode, right? Um and we mentioned something about the CFO Krishna Raalo of Anthropic and he said we have no immediate plans to IPO. We're taking our time. Back then they had achieved $9 billion of annual recurring revenue and they had estimated for the entirety of 2026 that they would hit something along the lines of $20 billion of ARR. They hit that in the first month and a half of 2026 and most recently they just hit $45 billion of ARR. That's because of the success of Claude Code, Claude Co-work and a host of other enterprise contracts which they are signing. They're doing a bunch of different JVS. They're raising money from Blackstone. doing a ton of different things. So, in contrast to SpaceX, they are actually earning a lot of money. So, it makes sense that they now want to take this a step further.

8:25 They're acquiring as much compute as they can, and they're in a race with mainly OpenAI to serve their frontier models, to train their frontier models, and to provide it to as many people as they can. That's why I think they're going forward with this IPO. Now, it's important to state that there was no details released, was there? This is just kind of like a mandatory statement that they had to make. Open I don't think had to do this but Anthropic in the efforts of transparent transparency decided to do it. Um I have a few reasons why I think they might be doing it but I don't know. Do you have any thoughts Josh? It's funny it's a it's a confidential disclosure of a confidential filing that was [laughter] like it's pretty ironic but I think this took a lot of people by shock. I everyone was kind of surprised at the rate. I was looking at Poly Market and everyone expected OpenAI to IPO prior to Anthropic. So to see this news shocked it and it kind of flipped the the margins on their heads there in terms of the poly market. But what I'm seeing here with the information post and this actually looks outdated because the rumors I've been seeing is that Anthropic is actually growing even faster than this and it's showing that Anthropic just has this unbelievable growth trajectory that has been driven by real value add mostly on the enterprise side in creating these like unbelievable models. I know. I mean, when you think about Mythos now. They announced it what, 2 months ago, which means it finished training even before that. And like they just have these unbelievably powerful models. I feel like they're feeling really confident going into this. And it gets into the conversation about how much money actually is there for the market to absorb. Is there actually a race to go out and collect capital? Because we know SpaceX is going first. The rumor is maybe around June 12th. That's coming in the next like 2 weeks. So that's going to absorb god maybe a hundred billion dollars of capital. It looks like they're trying to raise 75, but I'm sure it's going to exceed that. How much money can Anthropic then pull from that?

10:08 And then if OpenAI is after them, how much money is going to be left for them? And it feels like we're just demanding a lot from public markets. And like we started, the private markets, maybe they're tapped out, maybe they're not. But we're going to quickly learn how fast public market reserves can get tapped out because this is a tremendous amount of capital everyone's raising. I mean the way I think about it right is um you have a a subset of investors that are uh purchasing or will purchase the stocks of these different companies for one particular thesis right which is like I'm bullish on AI but then you have a whole retail subsection that are like I just use clude every day and it's super helpful to me so obviously I'm going to buy that thing right I use chat GBT every day right so there's these two subsects and they're all going to result in the same thing which is like we're going to purchase um stock of these companies now if you're on the company side you're using it for one thing.

10:56 Christian Ralph, CFO of Anthropic, has said it. Uh Sarah Frier, CFO of OpenAI has said it and Elon has said it. We just need more compute because more compute translates into better AIs, which translates into better products, which means that we can serve more customers, which means that we can earn more money. Now, in Anthropic's case particularly, I think uh the rumors around their AGI like model called Mythos is very real. We've got like breaking news from uh today that I have up on the screen that they're rolling out their project glasswing which is kind of like their bucketed sandboxed version of release for Claude Mitos to 150 additional organizations across the entire world. And they even said on a previous statement recently that they're going to be releasing it publicly to people over the next couple of weeks. So I think this all comes at a very coincidental intentionally coincidental time. And the other thing that's different with Anthropic is they're estimated to be profitable by the end of this month to the tune of $550 million, which listen is a drop in the ocean compared to like the trillions of dollars that are being spent on capex, but they'll be the first major AI lab to do so. And so it's just this massive run rate. I think of all these IPOs, I'm probably most bullish on the anthropic thing, but you know, they're all different to their own kind of lane.

12:07 Now, when we were looking at the our bubble meter in a few episodes ago, and we were kind of figuring out at what point do things get scary, it was largely around the idea that these large um mega companies like Google will start to spend more than their revenues allow them to. Basically, they'll start going into debt to fund these buildouts. And we have some indication that we're kind of slowly turning into that territory where Google has ran out of revenue on their balance sheet and are now looking to raise external capital. This is not IPO related. As you know, Google has been public for a very long time, but they need more money. So, what did they do? They went out and raised $80 billion to fund the AI buildout. That is a tremendous amount of capital. I can't remember the total capex spend that they guaranteed, but I imagine it's close to like 30 40% of the total that they were planning to spend annually, and they just went and raised it. Noteworthy.

12:59 Bergkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's old company, wrote a10 billion check to get in. And it's a pretty huge deal. It's $30 billion in underwritten public offerings, $40 billion through an at the market stock program starting in the third quarter this year, and then $10 billion through private placement to Birkshshire, which we just talked about. So, it's a huge deal. And I'm curious your take on this actually. Um, because we we did a deep dive into Google's balance sheet. We saw how much money they made. We saw how much they were spending. They were in the green. Now, it looks like they're intending to are they going to go in the red or are they just offsetting? Are they softening the blow so that they still have a lot of cushion just in case?

13:36 >> Yeah. Uh I think they're leaning all in and they'll eventually have books in the red. Um Larry and Sergey Brin uh the founders of uh Google uh said very explicitly, I think it was a year and a half ago, that they are willing to lose it all uh versus like lose the actual AI race. So, they're going to spend, spend, spend until they found enough. That's it's founder mode. They've gone back to founder mode. Sergey Brin came back to Google to do exactly this to kind of lock in. Um, this is my favorite IPO story of the week and it's not even an IPO, right? So, you have Google public company raising $80 billion. Now, the question becomes, what are they using that $80 billion for? Now, the headline is we're using this $80 billion to build out more AI capex. We're going to build more TPUs. We're going to serve more compute. Blah blah blah blah blah. But a story that a lot of people missed is I think it's like 30 billion of this 80 billion is being used to pay off tax obligations for their employees who are cashing out stock over the next couple of months. All right. So like I just I just want to be clear here like a large chunk of this raise isn't actually going to be used for the AI cap expand. Now putting that aside, Google isn't uh a bad actor in my opinion. um they have been pretty transparent as they can be with how much they're spending on all this AI stuff and what they intend to do with all of this and they're giving it their best shot. Now, what this gives me reminiscence of is Josh, do you remember at the end of last year we were kind of saying how open AI is kind of distracted? They're kind of focusing on like random AI products and they're like missing the whole coding AI thing and all that kind of stuff and then they decided to call a code red and lock in.

15:14 I feel like uh Google has drifted into that kind of like uh broad spectrum of things. They're not really focused. They're like building out an agent, but then they're building out they're trying to build out a better coding model. They're trying to build build out a better generalized LLM, but then they're building out the infrastructure TPUs, but then they're selling those TPUs to competitors, which means that they don't have enough compute to train their own Gemini models, which means that Gemini falls behind. And it has fallen behind.

15:36 Their recent Gemini 3.5 Flash is behind Frontier models despite all this money that they had. And now they need to raise all this money to train a better model. It just seems like they just need to kind of like lock in and focus. Now, when I look at this structure, $80 billion, that's a lot of money. It's effectively their own IPO to be able to fund their own buildout. I'm not convinced that spending $30 billion of that to write off tax obligations is the best way to do it. It kind of reeks a little bit of desperation, but I am optimistic because the last uh four times that we've had this kind of public raise from a major company, uh Berkshire Hathaway has put in a $10 billion check.

16:12 And all of those companies have done pretty well. So I'm hoping the same thing is gonna happen with Google. But it's just an interesting story. >> Yeah. I mean in Berkshire we trust right like they have been right in the past. They are very disciplined. We're going to hope they continue. It's also noted that Google owns a large percentage of a lot of these companies going public. I mean Google is one of the largest private stakeholders in SpaceX and also Anthropic. So they stand to benefit from the upside of this in a pretty considerable way. It's also a little bit scary how large these numbers are getting. Like we're it feels like we're getting numbed to the hundreds of billions of dollars number. I mean Google at 180 to $190 billion in capex this year is unbelievable to imagine just a few years ago. So for them to go all in, it's all in at a scale that we have never seen before. And I think that's one of the themes of this episode is we're really experiencing like this is a very special time in history because never in the history of this country and capitalism has this amount of money and value been concentrated on pursuing a single idea. And the outcomes of that are are going to be pretty big.

17:16 I mean bubble or not we're building real value. real intelligence is being built and I think like the actual underlying civilizational shift is going to start to be felt as the outcome of all the spending starts to make its way into the market and I think it's like it's easy to get lost in the numbers that are huge and large but it actually is going to result in real valuable tools and we make fun of Google they haven't come out with a new frontier model in a while but I mean I'm I'm just using their tools and services now and they're noticeably getting smarter and smarter and smarter.

17:44 One thing I'm excited about is WWDC next week we're going to be covering that. We'll see how Apple plans to actually roll out these tools and make them smarter and smarter. So, we'll see where all the capex has been going. But there is one more IPO that's coming that we haven't mentioned, which is OpenAI. >> Yeah, exactly. So, um we mentioned it earlier, but uh 10 days before Anthropic file for their uh potential IPO, OpenAI did the very same thing. Confidentially, confidential filing by the way. Um and so it was confidential even though it leaks. It's like if it's all gonna leak, you might as well just publish it yourself.

18:15 >> Yeah. What was curious is the poly market uh uh market on this particular IPO spiked up before the Bloomberg and Financial Times report. So there was definitely like some insider stuff going on, but basically Goldman Sachs and Morgan Sally have reportedly been uh behind the scenes helping OpenAI prepare for their IPO. Um if you're wondering why they're doing it, it's for all the same reasons. They want to raise more money to build out a bunch of different data centers. I think they broke ground on a new uh data center literally a few days ago. So uh it's all in. Um, a comment that I have is, and maybe this is like a a potentially hot take, Josh, is I think all of this money that is being raised and is about to be spent is ultimately going to result in uh a good thing. I think that it's ultimately not going to be bubbly in its nature and it's going to result in the necessary infrastructure that is going to be onshored in the west or in the US specifically to create that next bedrock of foundation for technological innovation. Um, you need compute, you need the electrical lines, you need all the substrates to make these GPUs and silicon chips actually work to serve it to customers. You need all of this. And we are currently constrained by physical atoms. If that sounds like a vague statement, it is not. I literally mean that. I sit on the Gavin Baker's uh camp of opinion here, which is no matter how much money you want to lever up and spend, you can't actually spend the money because you are limited by how slow it is to overcome regulations and build the actual, you know, brick and mortar of the data centers and then create the silicon chips. There's only one ASML, there's only one Nvidia, there's only one TSMC and it's hard to scale the physical infrastructure side of AI. So even if you wanted to lever up and create all these like weird debt structurings, it does not matter because there is nowhere to spend it on. You're limited by physical atoms. And until I see that block get unblocked, we're not in a bubble is my take.

20:07 >> Yeah. I mean I to talk about Gavin Baker's point again, he always mentions the idea of dark fiber comparing it to the internet bubble era where there was a tremendous amount of fiber optics laid for the internet, but there simply wasn't enough use cases for the internet to go through the fiber. There was a lot of dark fiber. A lot of the buildout didn't get used. It didn't generate revenue. Everything fell apart. In this case, I mean, we talk about this all the time, but the GPUs from four or five years ago are being rented for more money than they were four or five years ago.

20:33 >> Yeah. >> They're worth more. And it's funny that like like Michael Bur, the big short guy, he was like, "No, no, no. That's wrong. Everything's going to crash." He could not have been more incorrect. So, so far, all of the guidance, all the signals that we're seeing are green. They're all positive. Everything looks good. It seems like Capex is actually returning real value. I mean, there was the rumors about Anthropic maybe turning up profit sometime soon that you mentioned earlier. That's a really huge deal because if they could actually absorb all of this um fundraising money and then spend it in a way that's capital effective enough where they can return revenue, that's like huge. And OpenAI, I don't believe they were planning on doing that for at least till the end of this year. So, all these signs are green. The one thing I'm looking out for personally is companies who are cutting back on spending. I know there was some news in the headlines about a half a trillion dollar bill that came up for Amazon that was unintentional. I don't know how true these things are, but I think so.

21:28 >> Yeah. So, so long as companies are still extracting value from these AI systems, then they will continue to spend because it will just increase the revenue and increase the margins in their own business. And so far, so good. Fingers crossed it continues to go that way. Did you see the uh the crazy stat that Christian dropped on? I think it was like the invest like the best podcast. Um, Anthropic for the Fortune 10. So like nine out of 10 of the Fortune 10.

21:55 So the top 10 companies in the world basically use Anthropic CL code specifically and their net dollar retention rate which is basically like the budget that they started with January 1st versus how much they estimate to spend by the end of the year >> is increased by 500%. So they're planning to spend 5x more. But the reason why they're doing that is not because they have to. It's because they want to because they're getting so much ROI on the back end. So the point is like if this continues to trend in the right way. It's like the definition of a bubble is like it's overlevered and there's not enough demand on the on the buy side. We're seeing the opposite happen and we actually can't supply enough of the silicon and compute to serve the buy side. That's why Google's raising 80 billion. That's why all these companies are IPOing at massive valuations. It's so that they can serve that. And maybe I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid, but that's my take.

22:44 >> Well, and also think about the downstream effects of that. They're they're huge. Now we have all this infrastructure that we're building out in the United States. We have the ability to build it out and soon that's going to transition away from software as well. Like software will continue to be important, but I just saw a post from OpenAI recently. They're hiring for a robotics division. They're going to start building robots. SpaceX is building their Optimus robot. We're going to get a reveal probably around the time of the IPO, I would assume, to gather a little more attention. And I think what we're seeing here is this like really huge shift of industrializing the United States in a big way. Like we're going to get satellites into space. We're going to send data centers into orbit. This takes a huge amount of capital. But think about the value it delivers. Think about the value of cloning the internet but putting it into low Earth orbit. So that way it's it's nation state proof. It can never go offline. You never have outages. It's just this unbelievable technology that we're building funded by this capex buildout, this huge spending.

23:36 And now the public has the opportunity to actually get involved. So, is it going to be good or bad for the public? We will see. I'm feeling pretty bullish. I think this is where I wanted to end the show. Actually, EJ is asking you, which of these three, if any, are you most excited about and most likely to invest in at the IPO? >> Oh, damn. I'm excited about all of them, dude. Um, okay. If I had to rank them, it's Anthropic, SpaceX, and Open AAI, but like it's within like a hair's distance between each other. It's so tough. They're all building amazing things and I do truly believe that these three companies will create products and services that will become the bedrock of everything and anything that we build future businesses on. And so the question is how much would you value that kind of a company, right? We've never seen anything like this before, right? We've never seen a type of technological disruption which permeates every single industry that you could possibly think of, including the hardware side of things, right? What do you think happens when robotics scales up? You're going to need a robotics models. You're going to need data to do that. That's what these AI labs are going to do. And you're going to need you're going to need infinite compute potentially in space. You're going to need really smart models potentially trained on RL from Anthropic or from OpenAI that is able to do this. And these three companies are the clear bet.

24:50 So, if I take a long-term perspective, which is typically how I invest, I am I'm going to buy at IPO and we'll see what happens. You know, >> DC, I'm pretty stoked for for all of them. I think for me, SpaceX is is most interesting. I've been a fan of them for as long as I can remember. They are just >> How long have you been tracking SpaceX trust? You got to flex that. Come on. >> Well over a decal 9 program started because I remember watching all the live streams and in fact my YouTube channel is like I think 14 15 years old or something. The first video I ever posted was like a handheld camera of my screen of the Falcon 9 launch. It [laughter] was like it was pretty amazing cuz it's been so cool to watch them go from the Falcon 1 which was a single rocket thruster 29 to now Starship which has like between the booster and the first second stage like 39 40 engines. It's like unbelievable how much progress they've made and it's so exciting because it opens up this all-inspiring opportunity and having the opportunity to invest in that company to participate is really exciting to me. I know people are upset that it's trading so high on a relative basis, but when you consider what the future looks like in the case they succeed and when you consider what the team requirements need to look like, there's really no better chance. You can't assemble a better team. You can't assemble a better company than this to take a shot on goal. So, it's at least worth getting excited about and supporting that shot on goal that like Civilization is going to do something we've never done before in a really cool and exciting way that stands to benefit everyone else. And that's why I'm excited about SpaceX. I will try to participate. Hopefully it doesn't launch at like a $4 trillion valuation. Hopefully it stays kind of close to the share price it launches at.

26:30 I think that's another thing left to look out for is like how how high the premiums actually are once they start trading cuz we know there's going to be a ton of hype. But yeah, I think that's just about everything for this episode. Any final thoughts? >> That's no that's pretty much it. Um I just want to uh remind the audience that's listening to this that Josh and I are delusionally optimistic about a lot of these different things. We do try to ground ourselves occasionally, but overall we take an optimistic approach to AI and the frontier of tech. So, none of this is an investment advice. But if you did enjoy this episode or if there's anything that you actually disagree with, please let us know in the comments. You guys are very vocal. Um, wherever you listen to us, if it's on YouTube, if it's on Spotify, if it's on Apple Music or wherever, please subscribe, give us a rating, leave us a review, leave us a comment. We want to hear from you guys about what you guys think. Are you enjoying these kinds of episodes? Are there other topics that we could cover that you might be more interested in hearing more about? Let us know. But uh Josh, do you have any parting thoughts?

27:21 >> That's it. Share this with a friend if you enjoyed. Let them know what they got to know about these IPOs that are incoming. Let us know which ones you're going to be participating in. And as always, we will see you guys in the next episode. Thank you guys so much for watching. >> See you guys. [music] >> [music]