OpenAI i la febre de les IPO d’IA: vendre accions no prova que hi hagi una bombolla

Right now, the most valuable companies on Earth are racing to sell you their stock. It's more money, bigger names, and higher valuations than anything the stock market has ever seen. To some people, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. The greatest technology boom in history is finally opening its doors. For decades, the best companies stayed private, growing in the dark, and were out of reach for ordinary people. But now at last, the doors are being thrown open, and you get the chance to own a piece of the businesses that could define the next 100 years. But to others, this isn't a celebration at all. It's a trap. That's the side I'm on, and by the end of this video, I'm fairly confident you'll be on this side, too. Because in the stock market, an open door is never a favor. Generosity is never just out of the kindness of someone's heart. It's like nobody stopped to consider that in finance, every trade needs a counterparty. Every buyer needs a seller. So, if you're trying to buy stock, someone has to be willing to sell it to you. Which means before you buy what they're selling, there's one simple question worth asking. Why are they selling? In an initial public offering, the people on the other side of the trade aren't random. They're the founders who built these companies, the early employees who gave them years of their lives, the venture capitalists who funded them when they were nothing. Nobody on Earth understands these businesses better than they do, and they've seen the numbers you and I will never get to see. And they've looked at the most exciting companies of our lifetime, the ones everyone are desperate to own, and they made a decision. They'd rather have your cash than their own shares. This is what an IPO actually is. Strip away the headlines and the celebration, and it's

a trade with massive information asymmetry. The sellers are the most informed people in the room, which means the buyer, by definition, is the least. And right now, that buyer is you. So, here's the thought that should be lighting up in the back of your mind, the one that Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and everyone else behind this wave are quietly counting on you not to ask. If these really are the most valuable, most important companies in the world, and the future is as bright as everyone keeps promising, then why are the people who know them best in such a hurry to sell them to you? And there's an answer. It's a pattern that's repeated throughout the history of the stock market. It's shown up again and again right before nearly every major financial bubble pops, and most people have no idea it's sitting right in front of their eyes. I call it the dine and dash. In poker, a tell is a small unconscious signal that gives away what someone actually believes, no matter what they're saying out loud. Well, markets have tells, too. They don't come from headlines or earnings calls, and they definitely don't come from CNBC. They come from watching what people actually do with their money. That's one of the clearest tells there is, because the average investor sells when they get scared, when the news turns or the chart drops, when everyone around them is already running for the door. But, the professionals do the exact opposite. As Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and Warren Buffett's mentor, said, "The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimist and buys from pessimist." They sell when everything looks perfect, when the story

is loudest, the optimism is highest, and there's a line of buyers out the door begging to get in, because that's the moment you can get the most money for the thing you're selling, which is exactly what the IPO data shows us. When markets are booming, companies rush to go public and sell shares. But, when markets turn south, those IPOs disappear faster than my situationship the second I ask her, "So, what are we?" That's the top being sold to you. And like I mentioned earlier, we've seen this pattern again and again throughout history. Let's go back to June of 2007. Wall Street was booming, the markets were hot, and the two founders of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, decided it was time to cash in on some of it. Side note, who looks at a newborn and lands on the name Peter Peterson? Anyways, they took Blackstone public, and between them, the two co-founders walked away with about 2.6 billion dollars in cash. Then, a little over a year later, the global financial crisis hit, the markets crashed, and Blackstone's stock plummeted roughly 90%. It's almost like the soon-to-be world's largest alternative asset manager knew it was time to exit out of some assets. Or we can go back a little further to the dot-com bubble. In the years leading up to the dot-com crash, the number of companies going public exploded. And in 1999, the year before the bubble popped, the concentration hit a record. Of every company that went public that year, around 51% came from a single sector, tech. Then the year after all of them listed, after the insiders got rich and retail thought they were buying a piece of the digital future, the bubble popped. Over the next 2 and

1/2 years, the Nasdaq crashed more than 75% and an estimated $5 trillion in market value simply evaporated. It took 15 years for the Nasdaq to recover. And most of the companies that sold stock on the way up never made it to the other side. A study by the Kauffman Foundation and Professor Jay Ritter, the man known as Mr. IPO, found that 10 years after going public, only 29% of the emerging growth companies that went public between 1996 and 2000 were still standing as independent public companies. The rest were gone. The thing people thought they were buying no longer existed. But in 2021, we saw the same tail show up wearing a different costume. But before I tell you what that costume was, a quick pause. Because that phrase hits close to today's sponsor. Out in the real world, someone wearing a costume that isn't theirs has a simpler name, a copycat. So picture this, you build something, it works, people know the name. Then one day, someone else shows up using it. Same name, same logo. That's when you realize using a name doesn't make it yours. Registering it does. Which brings us to the sponsor of today's video, Trademark. Trademark makes it simple to protect your brand globally by handling the entire trademark registration process for you. Here's how it works. Trademark starts by offering you up to four free in-depth trademark checks carried out by real lawyers, not just an AI scan. You then just send a name or a logo and they flag anything that could prevent registration like identical marks, confusing similarities, or legal red flags, all for free. And if your brand comes back clear, they register it in the countries

you choose. But Trademark's protection doesn't just end after you register. Trademark continues monitoring your trademark, not just across government databases, but across the entire internet covering everything from social media to online stores to app platforms, so misuse gets caught early. And if someone does try to copy your name or logo, Trademark's legal team will step in and help you take action. If you're interested in checking out Trademark, you can get 20% off using the link below or by scanning the QR code. Promo code casual20. Thank you to Trademark for sponsoring this video. Now, back to that costume. Because in 2021, this same tale disguised itself as something Wall Street swore was the future. The SPAC. These are companies that go public before they're actually a company. You raise money from investors first, list on the exchange, and then go shopping for a real business to merge with. It's an empty shell with a checkbook, which is why people call them blank check companies. The appeal was simple. A SPAC let a private company reach the public market without sitting through the scrutiny of a normal IPO. It skipped a lot of the normal vetting process. So, the money came rushing in. In 2021 alone, 613 SPACs went public and raised more than 160 billion dollars. For a year, these blank check shells made up more than half of every new company hitting the US market. And the story ends exactly how you'd expect. Companies that completed a SPAC merger in 2021 lost 67% of their value on average. For those that de-SPACed in 2022, the average loss was 59%. And just like we

saw in on com the activity collapsed right after the rug got pulled out from underneath everyone. From 248 SPACs in 2020 to 613 in 2021 to just 86 in 2022. That's the dine and dash. When markets are booming, insiders are selling. When markets aren't, they aren't selling. It's a cycle we've seen over and over. So, what about AI? There's still a question that needs answering. Why now? Why are the most valuable companies in the world, fierce rivals who agree on almost nothing, all racing to sell you stock at the exact same moment? It comes down to two numbers. The first being the spending. I covered this in a previous video, but since 88% of the people watching this aren't subscribed, here's the quick version. This year, the largest technology companies on Earth are on track to spend around $725 billion building out artificial intelligence. That's up roughly 77% from the year before. It's the largest and fastest infrastructure build out in history, but most people struggle to even conceptualize how much $725 billion actually is. So, I'll use the same example I used in my previous video because I think it captures the absurdity of this better than anything else. If you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born all the way through the fall of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, both World Wars, and every single day up to right now, you still wouldn't have spent what Big Tech alone will spend on AI in just 2026. It breaks down to roughly $2

billion a day, 83 million an hour, or about $23,000 every second. But, there's also a second number that perfectly sums up the AI industry, and it's a number you probably have never seen. It's what all that spending is actually earning back. The research firm Exponential View put together the first real bottom-up estimate of the entire AI economy. Over the past 12 months, all of it combined generated an estimated $110 billion in revenue, and that's revenue, not profit. Put another way, the entire AI economy earned back an amount equal to roughly 15% of what Big Tech alone plans to spend this year. By any standard, that's a horrible investment. But I know what some of you are probably thinking. That's mostly Big Tech. Surely it's better for everyone else, like the actual businesses using this stuff. And the answer is no. It's actually far worse. Deloitte surveyed more than 3,000 business and IT leaders across 24 countries. They found that 74% of organizations want AI to grow their revenue, but only 20% have actually seen it happen. Another study by researchers at MIT looked even closer. They studied hundreds of real corporate AI rollouts, actual companies spending real money to put this technology to work, and they found that 95% of them produced zero measurable return. So, put those numbers side by side. $725 billion going in, almost nothing coming back out. That gap between what's being spent and what's being earned is what nobody seems to be watching. In fact, the market has priced these companies as if that gap doesn't

even exist. Take OpenAI, the company sitting in the eye of the storm. OpenAI is still private, but the financials leaked, and in June they filed confidentially to go public, so the picture's clear. Last year, OpenAI brought in around $13 billion in revenue, and before you say, "Pretty good." Well, the company nearly tripled that in losses. In 2025, OpenAI had a net loss attributable to the company of 38 and a half billion dollars. By OpenAI's own internal estimates, they expect to burn well over $100 billion between now and 2029. And here's the cherry on top. On top of all of these horrible fundamentals, the valuation is worse. OpenAI's last funding round valued the company at $852 billion, more than 65 times its revenue. Another side note, how did ChatGPT know I was talking about itself here? Anyways, these aren't bets on whether these are good companies. These are bets that ride on blind optimism, which reminds me of what goes down as maybe the funniest quote in finance history. And if you haven't heard of this story, you're in for a treat. It even beats out the Jamie Dimon cockroach story from a few videos ago. One of the people who stood at the very center of what's considered the worst financial crisis in history admitted a crisis was coming out loud on the record right before everything broke. In the summer of 2007, months before the entire global financial system nearly collapsed, Charles Prince, the CEO of Citigroup at the time, was asked about the bank's continued exposure to risky lending and deal financing, even as the credit markets

were starting to look increasingly stretched. His answer became one of the most infamous lines in the history of finance. He said, "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated, but as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." So, he wasn't saying the party would last. He actually was saying the opposite. He knew it wouldn't. He was saying as long as the money was flowing, he was going to keep dancing anyway, because the second the music stopped, whoever was still on the floor would be the one who lost. He understood that underneath all the dancing, it was really a giant game of hot potato, and the only thing that mattered was making sure you'd pass the hot potato on to someone else before the music cut out, which is exactly what you're watching now. Except the potato is stock in an AI company priced for perfection. The players are the founders and the insiders, passing it to the next eager buyer. Every one of them knows someone eventually gets left holding it, but none of them know exactly when the passing stops. So, the only rational move is to hand it off now to the biggest, most enthusiastic crowd of buyers they can possibly find, the United States stock market. So, let's go back to the beginning. At the start of this video, I asked you a question. If these really are the most valuable companies in the world, and the future is as bright as everyone keeps promising, then why are the people who know them best in such a hurry to sell? We've spent this whole video circling that question and giving context. Now we can finally answer it. It's because it's the smart thing to do. The people who run these companies aren't dumb. They can see the gap. They see that prices

have sprinted miles ahead of the fundamentals. They know that the market has priced these companies for a future where every one of these bets pay off perfectly. But they're also in the middle of an AI arms race, so they need deep pockets and an appetite for a bet with a slim chance of ever paying off can only last for so long, which means whoever sells first gets to sell into the hungry crowd. It doesn't actually matter if these companies are good or not. The price already assumed it. There's little room left for good news and enormous room left for disappointment. Eventually the disappointment. Eventually the fundamentals will catch up. They always do, but I can't tell you when. I don't have a magic stopwatch that can predict when this bubble pops. I don't know if it's in a month, in a year, or 3 years from now. I don't know if these companies grind higher for a long time before any of it matters. Nobody knows that and anyone who stares into a camera, hands you a date, and acts like they do know is lying to you. The reality is you don't need the date. You just need to be able to read the room, which is the reason I made this video and my channel in general is to help you read the room you're standing in so you're not the last one to notice the music. And if that's worth something to you and the version of finance you actually want, hit subscribe. Because you don't need to know the exact moment the music stops to know one thing. You don't want to be the last one on the dance floor when it does.