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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

In what way is SpaceX's volatility an obvious cause? It would be one thing if SpaceX was down from its IPO price, but it's not, it's just down from a post-IPO peak. To me this has all the hallmarks of a backfilled rationalization.

> OpenAI’s advisers presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public with a $1 trillion valuation, or lower the targeted valuation for a quicker I.P.O. Mr. Altman, said one person in contact with him on the topic, responded that any change to the trillion-dollar valuation was a nonstarter.

I really don't know how to read this and reach any conclusion other than, OpenAI leadership won't accept what financial analysts consider to be a rational valuation of its stock.

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> In what way is SpaceX's volatility an obvious cause?

Let me amend: it's a more-obvious cause given it's pertinent new information in a way Zitron partially leaking financials many institutional investors have already seen is not.

> don't know how to read this and reach any conclusion other than, OpenAI leadership won't accept what financial analysts consider to be a rational valuation of its stock

Neither did SpaceX and, as you say, it's trading above its IPO price and placing tens of billions of dollars of debt.

I think Zitron's analysis was on the balance good, though it didn't say a lot of what folks on here seem to have taken away (e.g., about OpenAI's inference being marginally unprofitable). It seems he's got a bit of a cult of personality around him, which makes me inherently sceptical. But it's a pretty ridiculous reach to claim OpenAI had to delay its IPO because of him versus the much-more visible and talked about thing.

Perhaps we're really on the same page. I don't think OpenAI executives read the Zitron article and said "oh my god now we can't IPO!"; I think they're both downstream of the underlying bad financials, which SpaceX only managed to mitigate due to the Elon Musk personality trade. (And I agree that this theory falsifiably predicts Anthropic will also find a reason to delay.)

> they're both downstream of the underlying bad financials, which SpaceX only managed to mitigate due to the Elon Musk personality trade

Idk, I'm still sceptical how someone could look at the market right now and conclude that it's suddenly hyperaware of financial metrics.

For whatever reason–maybe it's corporate-structure complexity, maybe it's lawsuits–OpenAI was always at the end of the pack of AI IPOs. If SK Hynix take August and Anthropic September or October, that would mean a 2026 OpenAI IPO would have to (a) coincide with one of those or (b) go to market during an election/post-election fiasco and/or the holidays. The realistic options were July or October, the latter being between a likely Anthropic IPO and the midterms. The timing just doesn't make sense and maybe someone realise that.

I think that's a pretty well balanced first analysis of this, considering how much we don't know, the IPO "slots" seem to be the most obvious influence.

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