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I am very curios if OpenAI's IPO attempt this year will turn into WeWork 2.0 where all the air suddenly comes out of the valuation once the market acknowledges

I am very curios if OpenAI's IPO attempt this year will turn into WeWork 2.0 where all the air suddenly comes out of the valuation once the market acknowledges that they have no moat and lack a clear path to profitability that would make these huge investments worthwhile.

onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
There are at least plausible scenarios where OpenAI is a VERY valuable company in the near future. There were not with WeWork. The SpaceX/xAI IPO will be more interesting.
- SecretDreams 8mo ago
  All of these things are vastly overvalued. Only one with tangible value is SpaceX because that's actually a moat-space. OAI holds no moat, has not done a good enough job to entrap their users, and has poor cost structure. xAi isn't even a point of discussion.. it's just a scheme to rip off investors. WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.
  - Ectiseethe 8mo ago
    > WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy. Masayoshi Son may not be providing returns for its investors but he is providing entertainment for the rest of the world.
  - luke5441 8mo ago
    SpaceX valuation is also going to be interesting. Talking about CapEx, SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones. And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small.
    - testing22321 8mo ago
      > And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small. The EV market was mighty small when Tesla started too. Skate to where the puck is going.
      - amluto 8mo ago
        Sure, but Tesla is doing a surprisingly poor job of capturing the EV market lately.
        testing22321 8mo ago
        Absolutely. But we’re talking about the launch market in the next 5-10 years, and it’s incredibly obvious it’s about to skyrocket
        amluto 8mo ago
        Is it? It’s less than obvious that the orbital datacenter boom will happen. Space mining could be a big deal but that’s not a foregone conclusion. Maybe someone will want to build a huge radio array on the far side of the moon, but I don’t expect hundreds of billions to be spent launching it — who would pay? Mars is less fashionable than it was a few years ago. Starlink is pretty impressive, but so is boring singlemode fiber, and the latter is increasingly being deployed everywhere. (Obviously it will “skyrocket” unless someone comes up with a commercially viable launch system that doesn’t involve rocketing into the sky…)
        testing22321 8mo ago
        There is Starlink and Amazon’s version, which both need many thousands of launches each (ignoring data centres) There’s US military stuff like the starsheild, and it seems extremely likely china will follow suit. Sat internet is changing the world rapidly where fibre can not be run. I saw it first hand in remote Australia, Yukon, Alaska and Africa. Not to mention ships and planes. These projects are aggressively driving down launch costs, which increases demand for launches, which drives down launch costs which drives up demand.
    - bgirard 8mo ago
      > SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones The deorbiting part is redundant. Their satellite are just that, a depreciating asset. Their lifetime seem to be 5 to 7 years. The important claim is if the total cost, including the launch, can be recuperate over that lifetime or not.
  - whizzter 8mo ago
    Yep, SpaceX actually has a track record as an actual leader and innovator in it's niche (that's very CapEx intensive to enter), it's not really a moat but it's a lead that no other entity seems to be closing in on (on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up). As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.
    - overfeed 8mo ago
      > on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up maybe the smaller ones; Blue Origin succeeded, and French and Chinese nu-space companies will continue to get funding for decades - national governments are capable of footing the bill of large CapEx projects. SpaceX competition is irreversibly tied to US foreign policy, and only scientific amd commercial launches are price-sensitive
  - sourcegrift 8mo ago
    Twitter is already dead as everyone on Hacker news knew. Nobody I know uses X or whatever it's called now, xAI? I'm looking at Musk going bankrupt and as soon as that happens Trump will be Impeached.
  - altairprime 8mo ago
    Wework was a valid long bet that office properties would re-appreciate once the pandemic stopped — but now that AI is pulverizing the job market, any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons), and/or a market-wide rehiring event due to AI’s failure to deliver, and/or regulatory shifts in profit taxation and new business investment that trigger the above-described boom. I know some commercial property owners in my hometown let their lowest-desirability storefronts sit vacant for twenty or thirty years (!) in order to prevent commercial property rent from falling across their entire portfolio. Turns out you can pay a lot of property taxes with not much revenue, and there hasn’t historically been regulatory pressure to pay an escalating “empty tax” to compel landlord pricing to behave according to supply and demand pricing models. Wework is still a terrible investment for an investor, but if you’re looking to bet long with no call and have the patient of decades, it’s not the worst plan. (There are certainly worse ways to gamble your money on the commercial property market!)
    - danny_codes 8mo ago
      No land value tax == wasteful speculation. It’s been known for 120 years but obviously rich people have done a good job suppressing that understanding
    - palmotea 8mo ago
      > any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons) That doesn't make sense for WeWork, though. Aren't they a rent-a-generic desk company? If you have any kind of specialist requirements (e.g. "processing resins") they'd seem like a bad fit.
      - altairprime 8mo ago
        Depends on how tall and ventilated your first floor is, I suppose!
  - lern_too_spel 8mo ago
    > xAi isn't even a point of discussion The reason GP said SpaceX/xAI is that these are now a single company.
  - tim333 8mo ago
    xAI is ahead of OpenAI on the LLM Arena 'Arena Overview' for what it's worth. Not bad given they've only really been going for a couple of years.
paxys 8mo ago
There’s a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are both trying to accelerate their IPO while still being wildly unprofitable. There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. If they go public this year the entire world is going to blindly buy them without looking at their books.
- burnte 8mo ago
  > There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. I've observed a very different state. From what I've seen the sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot.
  - nolok 8mo ago
    I agree, but I still think is overall point is correct: they need to do it now while it's still smoking hot
  - Stromgren 8mo ago
    It depends where I look. Among colleagues and tech-native friends, I feel like there’s healthy skepticism as well as the excitement about new tech. On the other hand, all the investment podcasts that I’ve been following for years are nothing but ignorant AI hype and reciting articles about how all the jobs are about to disappear. I guess the people who doesn’t make firsthand experiences are not leaving the hype yet.
    - zeeveener 8mo ago
      Both groups will operate on a wide spectrum, but if we're already generalizing... Perhaps there's a matter of competing priorities? Programmers are usually quite cynical overall, but in this case I see it as a "My CEO is telling me _out loud_ that they want to replace me, so why would I help them speed up that process?" Investors likely want what they're invested in to appreciate, so I imagine they're likely over-leveraged and are doing what they can to get their bag.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    > sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot. they hype for AGI has certainly deflated, i haven't heard anything about that being right around the corner and the implications in a while now. The hype and doom now seems to be coming from software devs only, the front page news articles about AGI have pretty much stopped for me. /"front page news" to me is the google news, US, Business, and Technology tabs
zerosizedweasle 8mo ago
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/ https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai... I hope so
jcgrillo 8mo ago
I'm super curious to see if Nvidia turns out to be Enron 2.0..
- quantified 8mo ago
  They would need to have massive accounting fraud and lose public support. Unlike Enron, Nvidia actually sells tangible goods at a massive profit, and hasn't appeared to gloat over people getting screwed over.
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > They would need to have massive accounting fraud and lose public support. Unlike Enron, Nvidia actually sells tangible goods at a massive profit, and hasn't appeared to gloat over people getting screwed over. But what happens if they can no longer sell those tangible goods at a massive profit, and they gave return to their roots selling to gamers? When the boom ends is when massive accounting fraud could happen.
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Not unprecedented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Vision https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-09-fi-2036-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-09-fi-2036-...
- chasd00 8mo ago
  i think worst case they go back to selling GPUs to gamers. That would indeed be a massive front page story and movies would be made about it but I don't think the fraud is there. They have a pretty straightforward business, make GPU cards and sell them.
  - userulluipeste 8mo ago
    "They have a pretty straightforward business, make GPU cards and sell them." They do, but that's not the (full) story here. Companies tend to easily migrate upwards, to a higher volume and/or higher profit margin market, and hardly (if ever) in the opposite direction. The painful restructuring necessary to enable this kind of reverse change is also damaging to the company brand, culture, and self-perception. If they ever get in such position, they may of course recover, but I wouldn't bet money on that.
Herring 8mo ago
A recognizable trusted brand is a moat, look it up. OpenAI has that in spades.

onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago

There are at least plausible scenarios where OpenAI is a VERY valuable company in the near future. There were not with WeWork. The SpaceX/xAI IPO will be more interesting.

SecretDreams 8mo ago
All of these things are vastly overvalued. Only one with tangible value is SpaceX because that's actually a moat-space. OAI holds no moat, has not done a good enough job to entrap their users, and has poor cost structure. xAi isn't even a point of discussion.. it's just a scheme to rip off investors. WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.
- Ectiseethe 8mo ago
  > WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy. Masayoshi Son may not be providing returns for its investors but he is providing entertainment for the rest of the world.
- luke5441 8mo ago
  SpaceX valuation is also going to be interesting. Talking about CapEx, SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones. And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small.
  - testing22321 8mo ago
    > And without Starlink the space launch market size is pretty small. The EV market was mighty small when Tesla started too. Skate to where the puck is going.
    - amluto 8mo ago
      Sure, but Tesla is doing a surprisingly poor job of capturing the EV market lately.
      - testing22321 8mo ago
        Absolutely. But we’re talking about the launch market in the next 5-10 years, and it’s incredibly obvious it’s about to skyrocket
        amluto 8mo ago
        Is it? It’s less than obvious that the orbital datacenter boom will happen. Space mining could be a big deal but that’s not a foregone conclusion. Maybe someone will want to build a huge radio array on the far side of the moon, but I don’t expect hundreds of billions to be spent launching it — who would pay? Mars is less fashionable than it was a few years ago. Starlink is pretty impressive, but so is boring singlemode fiber, and the latter is increasingly being deployed everywhere. (Obviously it will “skyrocket” unless someone comes up with a commercially viable launch system that doesn’t involve rocketing into the sky…)
        testing22321 8mo ago
        There is Starlink and Amazon’s version, which both need many thousands of launches each (ignoring data centres) There’s US military stuff like the starsheild, and it seems extremely likely china will follow suit. Sat internet is changing the world rapidly where fibre can not be run. I saw it first hand in remote Australia, Yukon, Alaska and Africa. Not to mention ships and planes. These projects are aggressively driving down launch costs, which increases demand for launches, which drives down launch costs which drives up demand.
  - bgirard 8mo ago
    > SpaceX has deorbiting assets on top of depreciating ones The deorbiting part is redundant. Their satellite are just that, a depreciating asset. Their lifetime seem to be 5 to 7 years. The important claim is if the total cost, including the launch, can be recuperate over that lifetime or not.
- whizzter 8mo ago
  Yep, SpaceX actually has a track record as an actual leader and innovator in it's niche (that's very CapEx intensive to enter), it's not really a moat but it's a lead that no other entity seems to be closing in on (on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up). As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    > on the contrary many would-be competitors seems to have almost given up maybe the smaller ones; Blue Origin succeeded, and French and Chinese nu-space companies will continue to get funding for decades - national governments are capable of footing the bill of large CapEx projects. SpaceX competition is irreversibly tied to US foreign policy, and only scientific amd commercial launches are price-sensitive
- sourcegrift 8mo ago
  Twitter is already dead as everyone on Hacker news knew. Nobody I know uses X or whatever it's called now, xAI? I'm looking at Musk going bankrupt and as soon as that happens Trump will be Impeached.
- altairprime 8mo ago
  Wework was a valid long bet that office properties would re-appreciate once the pandemic stopped — but now that AI is pulverizing the job market, any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons), and/or a market-wide rehiring event due to AI’s failure to deliver, and/or regulatory shifts in profit taxation and new business investment that trigger the above-described boom. I know some commercial property owners in my hometown let their lowest-desirability storefronts sit vacant for twenty or thirty years (!) in order to prevent commercial property rent from falling across their entire portfolio. Turns out you can pay a lot of property taxes with not much revenue, and there hasn’t historically been regulatory pressure to pay an escalating “empty tax” to compel landlord pricing to behave according to supply and demand pricing models. Wework is still a terrible investment for an investor, but if you’re looking to bet long with no call and have the patient of decades, it’s not the worst plan. (There are certainly worse ways to gamble your money on the commercial property market!)
  - danny_codes 8mo ago
    No land value tax == wasteful speculation. It’s been known for 120 years but obviously rich people have done a good job suppressing that understanding
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > any hope of that long bet paying off will require one of three things: a free-market boom in workers that require commercial property for success (e.g. physical invention companies like e.g. Saildrone due to not being able to homelab resins for safety reasons) That doesn't make sense for WeWork, though. Aren't they a rent-a-generic desk company? If you have any kind of specialist requirements (e.g. "processing resins") they'd seem like a bad fit.
    - altairprime 8mo ago
      Depends on how tall and ventilated your first floor is, I suppose!
- lern_too_spel 8mo ago
  > xAi isn't even a point of discussion The reason GP said SpaceX/xAI is that these are now a single company.
- tim333 8mo ago
  xAI is ahead of OpenAI on the LLM Arena 'Arena Overview' for what it's worth. Not bad given they've only really been going for a couple of years.

paxys 8mo ago

There’s a reason OpenAI and Anthropic are both trying to accelerate their IPO while still being wildly unprofitable. There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. If they go public this year the entire world is going to blindly buy them without looking at their books.

burnte 8mo ago
> There is still unlimited AI hype in the market. I've observed a very different state. From what I've seen the sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot.
- nolok 8mo ago
  I agree, but I still think is overall point is correct: they need to do it now while it's still smoking hot
- Stromgren 8mo ago
  It depends where I look. Among colleagues and tech-native friends, I feel like there’s healthy skepticism as well as the excitement about new tech. On the other hand, all the investment podcasts that I’ve been following for years are nothing but ignorant AI hype and reciting articles about how all the jobs are about to disappear. I guess the people who doesn’t make firsthand experiences are not leaving the hype yet.
  - zeeveener 8mo ago
    Both groups will operate on a wide spectrum, but if we're already generalizing... Perhaps there's a matter of competing priorities? Programmers are usually quite cynical overall, but in this case I see it as a "My CEO is telling me _out loud_ that they want to replace me, so why would I help them speed up that process?" Investors likely want what they're invested in to appreciate, so I imagine they're likely over-leveraged and are doing what they can to get their bag.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  > sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot. they hype for AGI has certainly deflated, i haven't heard anything about that being right around the corner and the implications in a while now. The hype and doom now seems to be coming from software devs only, the front page news articles about AGI have pretty much stopped for me. /"front page news" to me is the google news, US, Business, and Technology tabs

zerosizedweasle 8mo ago

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/ https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai... I hope so

jcgrillo 8mo ago

I'm super curious to see if Nvidia turns out to be Enron 2.0..

quantified 8mo ago
They would need to have massive accounting fraud and lose public support. Unlike Enron, Nvidia actually sells tangible goods at a massive profit, and hasn't appeared to gloat over people getting screwed over.
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > They would need to have massive accounting fraud and lose public support. Unlike Enron, Nvidia actually sells tangible goods at a massive profit, and hasn't appeared to gloat over people getting screwed over. But what happens if they can no longer sell those tangible goods at a massive profit, and they gave return to their roots selling to gamers? When the boom ends is when massive accounting fraud could happen.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  Not unprecedented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Vision https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-09-fi-2036-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jul-09-fi-2036-...
chasd00 8mo ago
i think worst case they go back to selling GPUs to gamers. That would indeed be a massive front page story and movies would be made about it but I don't think the fraud is there. They have a pretty straightforward business, make GPU cards and sell them.
- userulluipeste 8mo ago
  "They have a pretty straightforward business, make GPU cards and sell them." They do, but that's not the (full) story here. Companies tend to easily migrate upwards, to a higher volume and/or higher profit margin market, and hardly (if ever) in the opposite direction. The painful restructuring necessary to enable this kind of reverse change is also damaging to the company brand, culture, and self-perception. If they ever get in such position, they may of course recover, but I wouldn't bet money on that.

Herring 8mo ago

A recognizable trusted brand is a moat, look it up. OpenAI has that in spades.