Trillion Dollar Baby
The 2025 IPO market was a warm-up act nobody asked for. Figma popped 250% on day one! CoreWeave, the Nvidia GPU landlord, became the largest tech IPO since 2021. Good companies. Real businesses.
However, 2026 is an IPO year, and it’s a reckoning.
SpaceX. Anthropic. OpenAI. Combined, these three companies could hit the public markets with nearly $2 trillion in valuation. For context, that’s larger than the GDP of Spain. We haven’t ever seen prospects like this.
Here’s what’s interesting: OpenAI is scared.
Not of Anthropic’s technology, though Claude is gaining ground with enterprise customers who care about things like “not hallucinating legal advice.” OpenAI is scared of timing. Sam Altman knows something every founder learns eventually: you IPO when you’re the story, not when you’re defending market share.
And the market share erosion is real. DeepSeek. Kimi. Manus. Open-weight models from Meta and others. The moat OpenAI built with ChatGPT’s brand awareness is getting tunneled from above (enterprise) and below (free alternatives). When a Chinese lab releases a competitive model trained for a fraction of the cost, your $100 billion infrastructure bet starts looking less like a castle and more like a very expensive target.
So what does OpenAI do? The playbook is predictable: differentiate through partnerships, not just performance. Disney. News Corp. Exclusive content deals that make ChatGPT feel less like a utility and more like a platform. That’s French for bundling. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Which means ads aren’t a question of “if.” They’re a question of “how soon after IPO.”
Chinese labs are releasing frontier-competitive models at prices that don’t make economic sense. Unless the goal isn’t profit. It’s penetration. Flood the market. Let startups and developers build on your infrastructure. Create dependency.
The result? AI is getting commoditized faster than anyone predicted. Which creates a strange paradox: the technology is more powerful than ever, but the *companies* building it are more vulnerable than ever.
What does this mean for the average professional? Reskilling isn’t optional anymore, it’s survival. But here’s where I get optimistic, maybe naively so.
Every technological displacement creates a vacuum. The vacuum isn’t just for new skills. It’s for new spaces where people figure out what comes next. After the Industrial Revolution, it was the labor union and the public library. After the internet, it was the coworking space and the startup accelerator.
We need a third space for the AI era. Call it an incubator society. Places where displaced workers, curious entrepreneurs, and restless technologists collide.The most valuable skill in an AI economy isn’t prompt engineering. It’s knowing which problems are worth solving and finding the people who’ll solve them with you.
The 2026 IPOs will tell us which companies captured the first wave. The third spaces will tell us who’s building what’s next.
