The Delay That Should Worry You
OpenAI is reportedly pushing its IPO out to 2027.
The company has been eyeing an IPO and now looks to be waiting, holding out for a valuation near $1 trillion rather than taking a lower number sooner.
After watching SpaceX go public and then slide from above $200 to $153 in a couple of weeks, OpenAI’s advisers got nervous about how much appetite retail buyers really have. So the plan, for now, is to sit and wait.
I will give you my personal read, and it is only that. They are out of their freaking minds waiting until 2027.
Having watched the SpaceX debut, if I were sitting on a company like that, I would have gotten it to market as fast as humanly possible. Waiting another year is not patience, it is a bet that you can keep this entire market propped up the whole time, because the second things get dicey, that window slams shut.
Plenty of companies lined up to go public in 2021, the market turned in 2022, and some of them did not get out until 2024 or 2025. The window is never as open as it looks.
Now look at what is forcing the issue underneath all of it. The AI build needs memory, and the data centers have been buying up so much of it that the price of memory chips has roughly quadrupled in three quarters.
That is why Apple just raised prices on its Macs and iPads, some by a few hundred dollars, and took a 6% hit to its stock for the trouble. The thing eating the supply is the same thing everyone is racing to build.
Most people stop at the inflation story. I think it flips. Everyone is screaming inflation, and I think the talk is now so inflationary that we spiral the other way, into deflation.
Raise the price of a machine 20% or 30% and a lot of people simply stop buying. I will tell you right now, jack the price on my next laptop that much and I am holding the one I have like grim death. That is demand destruction, and it is poison for everybody pricing in endless growth.
Tie it back to OpenAI and the picture sharpens. The whole model runs on burning billions of dollars a month, and the way you keep feeding that is fresh capital from an IPO or charging more for what you sell.
Charge more for tokens into a crowd that is already getting squeezed, and you destroy your own demand the same way a $5,000 computer does.
For balance, Anthropic confidentially filed back on June 1 and still looks set to go public this fall, so not everyone is waiting. But waiting until 2027 assumes a lot about how good the next two years are going to be.
AI is real.
The open question is whether this is an AI bubble or a memory bubble, and my honest answer is probably a bit of both. We are giving up an enormous amount to build this thing, and the bill for it is starting to show up in places nobody was looking, like the price tag on a MacBook.
My weekly video update goes up on YouTube after today’s close.
I take the demand destruction case further there, and walk through what it means for the back half of the year.
To your success,
Don Kaufman
P.S. While all of this was unfolding this week, the OpenAI headlines, the Apple hit, the whole sloppy tape, I was in there slinging Superfly trades the entire time. Four of them closed green: AAPL +107%, GOOGL +118%, MSFT +154%, and META +169%. You do not have to wait for the macro to resolve to make money in the meantime, and that is exactly what Superfly is for.
