OpenAI Hits Pause On Its IPO

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Comcast jumped 5% after announcing it is spinning off NBC Universal and Sky from its cable business. Meanwhile, oil rose after the US and Iran exchanged fire over the weekend. President Trump said

the two sides are now set to hold fresh talks today, though Iran denied those claims. And finally,

Treasury yields was stable after the Supreme Court overruled Trump's attempts to fire-fed Governor Lisa Cook still in a separate decision the court expanded the President's authority to fire officials at other independent agencies. What else is happening? Open AI is reportedly delaying its IPO until 2027. The company confidentially filed to go public on June 8th and was on track to debut as soon as this fall. But according to the New York Times, the fallout from SpaceX's rocky

IPO has pushed open AI executives to hit the brakes. Meanwhile, arrival on Thropic is racing ahead. Calstry now puts the odds that anthrophic goes public this year at 76%. So, to discuss what this delay actually means for Open AI and for the AI markets in general, was speaking with Alex Heath, author of the sources newsletter and co-host of the Access Podcast Alex. Thank you for joining us. This is huge news, unconfirmed officially, but this was reported by the New York Times. Open AI the plan was

they were going to go public. They filed confidently and now apparently they're scared of doing it this year. You do a lot of reporting on Open AI. What do you actually know about this? What can we

“actually take away from this news? I think this was always very much in flux. It's been interesting”

to see how many versions of Open AI IPOing we can get in the press in the last couple of weeks. It's been kind of remarkable. I think there's a lot of investor banker types who are trying to gym this up. I don't think Open AI is ready. I know that they're still trying to get their finance and investor relation or in place for what is needed for a public company. When you do the confidential filing, you're as Open AI said when it did that, you're really just setting yourself up

with optionality to then be able to go out at a later date. But I remember read it. That thing was in confidential filing for years because they thought they were going to go out and then they did

“in and I can't remember if it was the pandemic or something else. But it's very common for companies”

to do a confidential filing, which is just starting the process with the SEC and then delay multiple times even years in some cases. Doesn't it seem though that at least there are people within the company who definitely did want to. The person I'm thinking of was Sam. And I remember we saw

Altman wanted to go public. He was trying to push that and then the CFOs, Sarah Frya said, "No, I don't think we're ready. I don't think this is the time to do it." I mean, I have to assume that there are people within the company who really wanted this to happen. And now they're probably having to concede. Maybe this isn't the right time. Specifically, Sam. Yeah, I mean the reporting is that Sam has been pushing for which I totally buy and that he wants

to one trillion valuation, which I also totally buy. I do think there's probably others who are saying we're not ready. Open AI and anthropic. These are not normal companies. They don't work like normal companies. They're incredibly chaotic. They don't have formal processes in place that a mature public company would have. As commercial entities, they're really only a few years old. So even though they have these massive valuations, they very much feel and you

feel this when you talk to people internally like a startup. And that has a lot of things that have to be ironed out before you can IPO. I do think anthropic will go out first. I have heard

“and others are reporting that they're eyeing October and November. I think they're a little”

farther along. I'm building that muscle. They also have a bit of a simpler story to tell investors because of the kind of clarity of what they do is primarily an enterprise API business. Open AI just has a lot of wild cards, right? Ads are still rolling out. That story is not there yet. The hardware stuff they're going to be doing with Johnny Ives starting with the first device. I think they're going to announce on the fall. That's a giant wild card. Their super app strategy has not yet

come into place. There's a lot of moving parts and there will always be with these AI labs,

but I think anthropic actually just has a simpler story to tell right now, which is also what we'll probably go first. I think that's exactly right, but I part of my takeaway from this is it seems as the open AI on multiple different levels doesn't really have its shed together. And the confidential filing to your point, this happens. Companies file, it takes a while, but you also have to assume that I mean, someone within the company should have known if we file, it's going to be reported on.

And if we don't go public, that'll be reported on. And everyone's going to have a lot to say about all of this. The same is true of saying, we're going to stop doing these side hustles, which was sort of their MO, and then they go out and continue to do these side houses, including going out and spending $2 million on a podcast. I mean, there are multiple different levels in which open AI doesn't really know what it's doing. Or at least that's the vibe I'm getting from all

of these stop and stop announcements. Am I being too critical or would that be a somewhat fair

characterization of the company? I think they are a jewelry company. I think this IPO thing is really being janned up in the media by investors. I think the only concrete thing that's happened is they filed a confidential S1. They said they would do that. When they announced it,

“they said we do not have a sense of timing. That is the only thing they have confirmed. And then”

there's a lot of anonymous reporting about, you know, they were thinking about the fall and other thinking about 2027. We may get a new round next week saying they're thinking about the fall again, based on whatever leaks out of anthropic. There's a lot of messages being sent through the press right now. I wouldn't necessarily take all of this as like super concrete. I think it is a very dynamic, fast-moving situation. Anthropics ARR could create or for some reason in the next

quarter. And then the story is not there. Open AI, super up thing could not work and then it needs another year to regroup from that. Ads could not work. The hard work could not work. You know, they may need to redo the executive bench. There's a lot of things that they have to get through.

I do think they will IPO. I would be shocked if it was in the second half of 2027. I

think it will be before that. Whether that's Q3, Q4, or Q1, Q2 next year remains to be seen. But we are going to get an IPO because you kind of have to, they've raised too much money. I mean, this is the natural and state. And they could do another private round. They'll do an employee tender offer here soon. But, you know, I do think Sam in particular wants to IPO. And, you know, based on the success of SpaceX, at least, you know, on the IPO day, they certainly have

“a path to that, I think. Well, it's funny. I mentioned that because one of the reasons that was”

cited in that article for why they're worried about going public was that they saw SpaceX as a failure. To your point, massive pop on IPO day, since then, it's come crashing back down. But it's kind of around where it was when it started. Do you think that that is genuinely a reason that they're worried about it when they look at SpaceX? I don't know, man. SpaceX, you went into the numbers.

based on their revenue, I think it's pretty good. I also think it's ultimately pretty good. I think ultimately, it's not going to lost. I think that's going to be a problem, which was, honestly, why I was a little surprised to see that in the reporting, that they saw SpaceX as a problem. Did Scott calling Tesla being over not teaching anything at you? Can't. This is Elon. Come on.

Look, I think SpaceX at 2 trillion and raising 80 billion or whatever on the IPO signals

there as a market here. I don't know if like, you know, the third big AI IPO gets as much love as the

“second, right? I think that's why OpenAI and Thropic really want to go first. One of them,”

it will be a little tougher sell when you hit the third one. I mean, how much retail demand is there for these things and where will the world be in the fall with the midterms, everything going on in the world, right? So the fall gets kind of hazy and complicated in a lot of ways. I think Elon times SpaceX perfectly in the sense of this AI bubble firmer we're in in the markets. I think it's very unclear what happens. The Fed may raise rates in the fall. There's a lot of things that can make the stock

market a really dangerous place. Do you think that ultimately this has implications for the AI trade

at large? I mean, if the signal we're getting from OpenAI is, there isn't enough demand out there. There isn't enough excitement or hype or we're not ready. Does that mean that we're headed for some problems in the AI market at large or is this more of an OpenAI specific issue?

“I think it's an OpenAI thing. I think these companies are just not ready and they're way more chaotic”

than they look even on the outside, even to people following them. They're startups still. They don't have all of the rigor in place that you need as a public company. OpenAI's disclosures are a mess right with, you know, sammons, no equity, they're invested in all these things that they're doing deals with. The governance is all over the place. I mean, it's just a very complicated company to try to make sense of if you're like the SEC. So I think they're

probably just going to keep sending smoke signals out, you know, of like, oh, we're going to do it now. Oh, no, we're going to do it now. And like, anthropic will do the same thing and we're in

uncharted territory. I mean, I feel like that's always the case with AI and the AI trade,

but it really feels that way now doesn't it? We should literally do a smoke signal from Sam

“Altman's house, let it out like the Pope when he finally decides that it's time. That'll be”

that'll be the right story for investors. Okay, Alex Heath is the author of the sources news that encourage the access podcast. Alex, always great chatting with you. Thank you so much. Always great. Thanks, Adam. After the break, Bitcoin enters a world of pain. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter simply put at simply putt.proxymedia.com.

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LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/scot. That's linkedin.com/scot. Terms and conditions apply. We're back with property markets. The price of Bitcoin is plummeting. And as of now, the sell-off is showing no signs of stopping. In just the past month, Bitcoin has fallen from around $73,000 to $60,000 last week. It hit its lowest point since October of 2024 before the election.

And despite the Trump administration's pro crypto agenda, investors today are nowhere to be found. All told Bitcoin has erased more than 18 months of gains and it's down over 40% in the past year. So, for more on this implosion in the crypto markets, we are speaking with Jamima Kelly, columnist at the Financial Times. Jamima, thank you so much for joining us. Back in February, we were seeing a lot of weakness in the crypto markets. Bitcoin took a leg down to around $70,000.

And that seemed really bad at the time. And you wrote this column, basically saying that Bitcoin was in your view due for even more pain. And that is indeed exactly what we're seeing. We're now down to $60,000. It's basically been cut in half since its highs of around $120,000. Let's just start with your reaction to what we're seeing here in the crypto markets. I mean, yeah, as I wrote, I still felt that Bitcoin was $70,000 to high when it was at $70,000.

“So, I now think it's about a Sue Sue, that's the two highs. I think that fundamentally”

there's nothing there because it's all just belief. And therefore, eventually we'll get to zero.

I've never been someone who wants to kind of say when that's going to happen.

But it definitely has felt to me. The reason I wrote that column in February is because it has felt to me that this is kind of the kind of we're getting to the last bit of Bitcoin. And I'm not going to stick my neck out and say it's going to happen this year that we're going to zero. I don't think it will happen that soon. But the fact that we have this incredibly friendly crypto environment and it still kind of doesn't seem to be finding any way of like any support

does suggest that that we're heading down and down and down from here. Your view is that $60,000 is $60,000 too high that actually the true value is zero, which for many that would be an extremely striking statement. Why do you believe that this is that this is worth nothing? There is nothing that underpins Bitcoin other than belief. It is built on sheer belief. And obviously stock markets and other markets are built to some extent on belief.

And we're constantly thinking about what a price of an asset is based on past performance and

expectations for future performance, future growth, future returns. And so obviously there's always

a speculative element within any kind of asset price. With Bitcoin, there is only speculation or crypto. And people don't like Bitcoin to be lumped into crypto because that's their way of making Bitcoin scarce. That gets me to the next problem. There's no scarcity. There is an unlimited number of crypto currencies. So you can't really have value without there being scarcity because otherwise why would someone pay for something? There's an unlimited amount of it. So the way that

people try to make Bitcoin scarce, which is because there'll only have to be 21 million Bitcoin's, that's that was baked into the code in the beginning, is by saying that Bitcoin's different from

all the other cryptocurrencies. It is in so far as it's got the first mover advantage. But apart from

“that, it really isn't. And it maybe has a network effect and everything. But again, that's what we're”

saying there is Bitcoin's different because it has more belief. It's more established that the belief in it is more established on the others. So again, it's if there's no scarcity and there's nothing fundamentally underpinning that price. There's no bottom. There's no flaw. So people say it's like gold and gold is speculative. Sure, gold is partly speculative. But people, I'm wearing gold. We have gold in our iPhones. Gold is useful. People like to wear gold. It's a real thing. Bitcoin

and cryptocurrencies just represent digital strings of digits. That's all they are. And they are

then it will go to nothing because that's all there is. There's nothing else under there. I've been wondering what point will people decide? Because I mean, I find Bitcoin will be a precarious asset as well. I've been wondering at what point will people decide? You know what, we don't believe in this thing anymore. Is this that moment? I don't think that that moment is going to happen all in one go. I think that moment is starting to happen. And there will be a

final kind of death spiral in which everyone quickly runs tries to run for the exit. When we don't seem to be completely there yet because Bitcoin isn't in complete free fall, cryptocurrencies aren't in complete free fall. There are a huge number of vested interests who will,

“I mean, that's the thing. That's why I consider a headless Ponzi scheme because it's or a kind of”

akin to somewhere between a Ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme, multi-level marketing scheme, because it relies on constantly recruiting new people. And it requires also, in crypto's case, it really requires a lot of people who kind of stay and hold on, hold on for dear life. And don't sell. And you really need people to not sell in order for the death spiral to not occur. You've now got Michael Salo who's like the big dog of Bitcoin. I don't know what to call him,

but he is the kind of biggest holder of Bitcoin in the world. He, you know, turned his company into a

Bitcoin holding company. He's now saying he's going to sell over a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin.

So it's not, I don't think it's like necessarily now, but I think that what we're seeing is crypto, each time crypto has had a big run up. There's been a narrative. There's been a story for why it's going up. And that has there's been a reason, right? So you had in 2017 you had ICOmania. So you had these initial coin offerings, ICOs, that basically people were just like making money out of thin air. Everyone was getting rich and people were just like coming up with these ridiculous

tokens and running off with the money. And because people had to buy Ethereum, Ether, the cryptocurrency native to Ethereum network. That was going up massively in value and all the other cryptocurrencies were going up with it. So there was that reason for the kind of big boom in 2017. Then you had

“a later boom was fueled by the NFTs, non-fungible tokens. So if you remember that and the”

Metaverse and Web 3 and people were suddenly convinced that, oh my gosh, like this is the future of the internet. I think that was the dumbest era of markets in my lifetime, yeah. Well, NFTs and ICOs, to be honest, it's really hard to know, to like, like, fine line. ICOs arguably worse than NFTs, but yeah, they're both pretty bad. But the most recent run-up

in prices was a bet on Donald Trump, basically being this like crypto president, despite the fact

that obviously a few years ago, when he was president the first time around, he said that he doesn't believe in Bitcoin crypto because suddenly it seemed like he had some meetings with some some kind of big crypto executives who might have been willing to maybe buy his crypto coin and maybe give him some money. Suddenly he was going to be the like Bitcoin president make America the crypto capital of the world. And in that context, we've seen crypto actually doing

badly. And so there's kind of like that was like, when you keep seeing these narratives unraveling, the starts to be like a loss of faith because it's like, well, hang on, this was meant to be the time. People are putting Bitcoin into their ETFs into their 401ks. All of these executives have been like, you know, pardoned and released from prison because like Donald Trump was in that setting in that like extremely permissive setting. If crypto is still not thriving and actually doing

worse than it was before Trump came in, that seems like a kind of problem because what's the next

“story like and we have we kind of run out of stories. And I think perhaps we have run out of stories”

because people are becoming a bit little bit disillusioned because each time there's a new story, it turns out that it kind of turns to nothing and then crypto crashes again. So yeah, I think I think we've kind of run out of stories for crypto and I think that's an issue. Do you mind what Kelly is colonists at the financial times? Do you mind what thank you so much for your time? Thanks for having me.

If you were worried we're in a bubble, I have some news for you that probably won't help. A new article

by Baalian Wang, a finance professor at the University of Florida, reveals that first quarter earnings

this year were artificially inflated by roughly 12%. How is that possible? Well, it's all because of a strange accounting standard known as ASU 2016-01. Under this rule, companies are asked to measure the value of their own private venture investments and then report those returns or losses on those investments in the other income section of their income statement. Now historically, those numbers have

but in the age of AI, that is no longer true. In Q1 of 2026, alphabet Amazon and Nvidia reported a

“combined $69 billion profit, not from selling chips or selling ads or selling cloud services,”

but from gaining huge returns on their AI investments, specifically in their investments in companies like Anthropic and also Open AI. In other words, despite the fact that these AI gains are still unrealized gains, they are nonetheless being realized in the earnings of some of the largest companies

“in the world. And it is against those same earnings that investors are now pricing this market.”

And then looking at those price to earnings multiples and then ultimately determining whether or not we are indeed in a bubble, which basically means that our main bubble indicator is now also

in a bubble. So the question then becomes, how pervasive is this really? And the answer is

“quite. Professor Wang estimates that private market valuations account of a roughly 12”

sense of every dollar of profit in the S&P 500 in Q1 of this year. And without those markups on those AI companies, S&P earnings growth would have come out to roughly 16 percent, which is exactly the same as its five year average. Put another way. All of this talk of how earnings growth is through the roof this year. All of that must now be taken with a huge grain of salt. Yes, corporate earnings have exploded, but they have done so on the backs of some very fuzzy private

valuations in AI. In sum, it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what's real and what isn't

in this market. And it is exactly in those grazones that bubbles both materialize and ultimately

collapse. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams, our research team is Dutch Alon, Isabella Kinsel, Christenodonahue and Mia Solvario, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof. Markets from Prof. Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

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