‘We expect it to leak’: OpenAI is frontrunning the narrative around its $1 trillion IPO

Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:

OpenAI says it expected its IPO filing to leak.

Will investors swallow three $1 trillion-plus IPOs at once?

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Oil stocks are approaching their “operational floor”.

Your chances of getting an internship at Goldman Sachs are very small.

The evils of fruit juice.

Gen Z students arrive at college with “an inability to read sentences” (allegedly).

OpenAI says it filed for an IPO because “we expect it to leak” 

OpenAI confidentially filed IPO papers with the SEC yesterday, setting the stage for yet another massive tech company float later in the year. You can read OpenAI’s statement here. It’s very short. Here is the entire thing, verbatim:

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

The most interesting aspect of that statement are the words “we expect it to leak,” which suggest the company was rushed into making the statement—or at least didn’t want to be rushed into making it and thus got its retaliation in first, so to speak.

The valuation is expected to be greater than $1 trillion, per the FT. It was most recently valued at $852 billion.

That would make it the third $1 trillion-plus IPO expected this year, following SpaceX ($1.78 trillion) and Anthropic (last valued at $965 billion). The Wall Street Journal has a great story about the vast firehose of money pouring into AI right now. $159 billion in bond funding this year alone, for instance, including some really offbeat vehicles such as Google’s 100-year bond, at a yield of 6.05%, denominated in British pounds sterling. 

Apollo and Blackstone raise $35bn in chip financing deal for Anthropic - FT

Will investors be willing to swallow three $1 trillion-plus IPOs at once?

OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all asking investors a similar question: Are you willing to buy stock in our massively valued, unprofitable, speculative business models, which rely on a ton of assumptions about the future that have yet to be borne out? Some on Wall Street are saying no. Fortune received an email this morning from one CEO at an asset investor with $1 billion-plus under management who says he wouldn’t touch ‘em for six months. (Presumably that’s to watch for the effect of the end of the executive lockup periods, after which insiders will be allowed to sell their stock.) 

"Markets face the test of yet another superheavyweight firm listing to test demand for these highly-valued companies that promise to reshape not just the investing landscape, but the entirety of human society,” IG’s Chris Beauchamp said in an email. “The parallels with the early 2010s when the previous wave of loss-making tech [companies went public] are clear, but this time the stakes are much higher and the risks much greater."

Investors should worry about “the increased circularity of the whole [AI] thing,” AllianceBernstein says

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