Ask HN: OpenAI, SpaceX/xAI, Anthropic all to IPO, is this a sign of the peak?

IPOs solve two problems: They help the investors/owners increase their personal wealth, and they give the companies a large inflow of both cash and and new structure for their stock. The question becomes what are the companies going to do with their new pile of resources? Cash can be put into operations, growth, research etc. Stock can be used as leverage for M&A activities. It changes the runway, the options for compensation and incentives to the staff, and the options for large expensive projects.

Whether or not this is the peak depends entirely on what they do after the IPO. If they just use their money as an extended runway to keep doing the same stuff they are doing today, they will probably sink. If they use it to take their research and products to new heights, they will probably rise. And if they do M&A and scoop up a lot of small companies, then it depends on how good they are at integrating acquisitions. There is also the question of "Is money a bottleneck for innovation and growth?" If money is not the bottleneck, then the IPO becomes far more about the investors cashing out than the company being empowered by new capital.

So "is the peak?" is going to be answered by a more strategic question of "Does the leadership of this company have the skills to effectively use the incoming resources?"

SpaceX is a bit misinterpreted.

There is little chance of Mars being profitable. Every colonization (and we have a rich history of them) is "successful" if it is profitable for the backers. But unlike North America or South Africa for the Europeans, there are no resources there worth bringing back. It's a cool vanity and possibly scientific project but not an interesting business.

Renting out all the GPUs stockpiled by Musk sort of is, unless they get constrained by power, water, etc. Launching them into space may be worthwhile for the short term. That's a business that can be profitable, but not in a way that matches the cost of the equity (with Elon strings attached all over it).

Practically, if you didn't like the idea of Iran threatening cables under the Strait of Hormuz, wait until your Starlinks (and your zero-G factories producing incredibly important whatevers) are threatened by a hostile nation. For commercial applications in space to become normal, military protections in space need to become normal. Now you've bought an interesting new world.

Really, SpaceX is Musk 3.11 for Workgroups and you have however long til he expires to find out how good that is.

Yes, the insiders want to cash out at the peak and reduce their exposure. The general public will be holding the bag here, simply because the passive investments will be forced to buy into these at huge valuations before price discovery can reasonably complete.

Howard Marks has a useful exercise on where we are in the cycle called Taking the Markets Temperature.

I'd add my opinion is that (specifically financial and not technological) there are few arguments to say we are early in the cycle.

Yes it is.

Also what happens when these players cannot afford to keep offering cheap token generation?

Yes