The revenue trajectory is now anemic, no clear sign of stopping the cash burn anytime soon, and all the liability associated with all things Sam Altman at this point. Frankly it’s a mess.
In Warren Buffet’s Cinderella party scenario it’s 11:59 at the party and someone just found an accurate clock.
Seems an awful lot like Apple will commoditize the models that power Siri, and just “sherlocked” a trillion dollar private company.
Apple has sat out a capital-allocation shitshow. Its investors and likely customers are better off for their patience.
We can't say for confidence they'll find a niche in the AI world. But we can say they probably sat out some value-destroying capital investment. Like, I don't think Apple is going to wind up strategically worse off than Meta. But it won't have blown a metaverse on this.
Elon is 100% a for profit person, it's just a 10 year rivalry between Sam and Elon.
Presumably those things were harder as a charity/non-profit.
Perhaps Larry Ellison can cut them a nice quid pro quo for a few months to make OpenAI look profitable (like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal), although that's probably unlikely given the debt Oracle is taking on to build it's infra.
I understand the scepticism around Google's deal with SpaceX, given the former holds a stake in the latter. But Anthropic buying SpaceX's compute doesn't have any related-party smell to it. That genuinely looks like SpaceX having cornered some valuable compute.
This is a reasonable accusation! It doesn't make a lot of sense–the Journal article is worth a hell of lot more than SpaceX referencing Anthropic's profitability. And we have zero evidence for it–one could raise this accusation against any compute partner Anthropic were to buy from.
Reasonable. The influencers who just learned the term circular financing are mostly idiots. The ones pointing out the conflict of interest with Google are technically correct, but the conspiracy takes so many moving parts to yield such little gain that it would have to be particularly stupid in vision yet competent in execution to pull off.
But asking if there is a quid pro quo between Anthropic and SpaceX? Like, there could be. We have no evidence of it. The S-1 mention doesn't make any sense. But they're both going public and if I were a journalist I'd look into it.
The base case, that there is commercial value to xAI's datacenters that folks in the frontier-model space are competing to get access to, does seem to be one folks here are actively rejecting.
That's nice way to say "invested in AI that turned out to be flop nobody wants to pay for so they are selling spare capacity"
Both takes are true. xAI invested in capacity that was supposed to yield frontier-model-maker margins. Grok failed to generate enough interest. So now they're selling it.
That's absolutely a good business, in a way that's more certain than the frontier-model one. But it's also lower margin, which doesn't support the sort of valuation SpaceX is going for.
Data centers (before recently) are low margin businesses because all the inputs are commodities: you buy power (joules), power (PDU), cooling hardware, physical racks, etc.. from the same vendors as everyone else. Worse, your biggest potential clients have the scale to just build it on their own and cut you out because of their scale and because you don't bring anything unique (outside of maybe physical proximity to an interesting market)
xAI has all the same commodity inputs plus another huge upfront capital expense (GPU/storage/networking), and their customer base is exclusively the well-funded companies who would normally just build it on their own.
I assume that they can't get better deals from nvidia than (e.g.) Microsoft because of their scale, so the unit cost of their inputs is the same or worse than their clients.
So the whole game is hoping that they hope to charge more now because people can't build fast enough and try to recoup their upfront costs before either a) other capacity comes online and b) the installed hardware becomes obsolete.
I'm being earnest -- it seems like they're trading one tiny margin service (datacenter) for another tiny margin service, with the added difficulty that there's an additional 10 figures of upfront expenditures and their viability depends solely on paying everything off before the price floor drops. Maybe it's staunching the bleeding, but it seems like not a great move
AI compute hardware is not a commodity. And in a shortage, commodities can command high margins.
xAI has lots of NVIDIA GPUs and HBM. It also has permits and power hook-ups, both things that are getting harder to come by day by day in the U.S. Natural gas is a commodity. Doesn't make having lots of right now bad business.
> the whole game is hoping that they hope to charge more now because people can't build fast enough and try to recoup their upfront costs before either a) other capacity comes online and b) the installed hardware becomes obsolete
Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages that make beating (a) and (b) easier. (From what I can tell, (b) isn't an existential issue, at least for xAI, because they've basically already recouped their investment with commited contracts they'd have to fuck up on to lose.)
I don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity", but I'm happy to be wrong on that. My point was that spaceX's ai division is buying all their inputs from external vendors and can't meaningfully differentiate themselves from person Y who buys all the same hardware except for the fact they bought them first. Which...
> Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages
I don't see now this is an "incumbency advantage". There's nothing that sticks their clients to stay there and sign up for the next data center.
People pay markedly more for NVIDIA GPUs than they do for others. That opposes the fungibility requirement of a commodity.
Which is why nobody should claim NVIDIA makes a commodity.
You're right that long term it should stabilize into a low margin business.
Elon is also much less risk averse than others, which helps to build stuff fast, possibly cheaper, pushing legality to the limit. Colossus was definitely built much faster than anything else. I think building datacenters suits him better than a pure software play, where "move fast break things" is already the norm.
WRT SpaceX building data centers: I think there's a natural tension between a "low margin business" and "being risk adverse". SpaceX (the rocket business) did well because it was high risk and high reward. Building a 10b datacenter to hope to get a slice of a low-margin industry is high risk and low reward and just seems fundamentally like a losing strategy.
Also I think stuff like Hetzner is a commodity. But are gigawatt scale data centers a commodity? You need those for AI training.
Anyways their goal is datacenters in space, not traditional data centers. Although I think that's only viable for inference.
Like they might have hired really good AI infra folks, gotten really good uptimes on their nodes, gotten folks who really know how to configure Infiniband (or whatever). But then, didn’t find the folks who knew what to run on that infrastructure. Or maybe Grok just had too much political drama around it.
EDIT: said 50 engineers at $50m/yr originally and meant 50 @ $1m/yr
When Anthropic spends on xAI, it benefits Google. When google spends on xAI, it benefits Google. When xAI spends on Google, believe it or not, that benefits Google.
This is how a Ponzi -style circular financing scheme typically works.
Unless Google is directing these transactions, this is not a novel issue. (We see a similar effect with mutual funds owning most companies [1]. It's a weak effect.)
> This is how a Ponzi -style circular financing scheme typically works
No. It's potential conflicts of interest. It's not circular financing. Circular financing follows the cash. When NVIDIA invests in OpenAI so OpenAI can buy NVIDIA chips, that is circular financing.
[1] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-rise-of-the-mutua...
Google has a fantastic balance sheet with or without these investments. None of the recent deals have uniquely enabled an IPO. So they'd be playing to increase their stakes' value by a few points ahead of a dump, a dump that would almost certainly wipe out much more than they'd stand to gain by trying to make someone else a dollar so they get nickels and dimes out of it.
This is literally true for any revenue. Treat the buyer and seller as a single company and their transaction is internal.
Eh given the quality of recent IPO proposals I think they can just say there's a couple zillion air molecules to turn into gold and be done with it.
The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.Which market? The stock market? Or the tech stocks? Or something else?
Both.
Across the entire stock market, not a ton of bright spots _except_ for Tech.
Take a look here: https://finviz.com/map?t=sec_all&st=w52
https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-blindsided-ai-compani...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea of turning over shares in his company to Trump in early 2025 and discussed the matter again with senior officials in recent weeks
i think that we are going to see another leg up but this is gonna be it for a while
Having said that, it’s the company I have least faith in due to the recent acquisition of xAI / Twitter.
Pension funds are rarely passively run. They tend to be sophisticated investors. For example, several pension funds are already investors in SpaceX.
NASDAQ 100 will include SpaceX after a couple weeks. But it's a tech fund. It's strange to complain about buying the largest tech company in a tech fund. Similarly, S&P total market and Russell total market will buy early. But again, those are total-market funds. If you want to actively manage your portfolio, don't buy total-market funds.
Nothing was blocked. S&P 500 never adopted them. Influencers misunderstood what a consultation document is and presented a question as a fait accompli.
NASDAQ 100 changed its rules, as did S&P and Russell's total-market funds. But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ever talked about that index before this.
Most people know the NASDAQ100 as its ticker QQQ. Also known as the high risk - high reward investment.
After reading how Nasdaq changed the rules in order to court all the mega IPOs to list with them, I will never ever consider a Nasdaq fund again. The rule change about the available float is especially shocking.
We have zero evidence for that chain of causation. And we have zero evidence of significant outflows for NASDAQ 100 since this rule change. (There is early evidence of inflows, but I suspect that's just because nobody talked about the NASDAQ 100 before and this turned out to be a brilliant marketing move.)
And I don't really care about the chain of causation. The change of rules for the available float and the fact those funds will buy based on the market cap and not the float makes it a completely irresponsible investment at this point.
It's an index. The conventional way to market weight is to use market cap. The float rules are mostly for technical reasons around transaction costs for very large indices. There is a theoretical argument for float weighting, inasmuch as if you bought the stock market you'd be buying the float, not all of all of the companies. But I haven't seen research to say one way is definitively better than the other.
I agree they should have probably paired the float-rule change with a gradual onramp. But again, NASDAQ 100 isn't big enough to really need to care about this. (Half a trillion is obviously a lot of money. But not relative to the equity markets, and not when spread across a hundred of the largest names.)
No the float rule is to avoid having to buy so much stock compared to the available stock that it would create irrational prices. This is probably going to happen with those IPOs. It's pure offer and demand!
To put it differently: Imagine a company is valued at 100B$ but only released 1% of its stock for sale (1B$). The NASDAQ100 includes it in its index based on the market cap only and because of that now needs to own about 100m$ of that stock. You are now trying to buy 100m$ out of only 1B$ available stocks. Prices are going to skyrocket artificially. If it was weighted on the float, it would only have been required to buy 1m$, which would make way more sense.
And an index can be whatever the company behind it wants it to be. The SP500 can decide absolutely whatever they want and every index fund will just have to agree and comply and buy based on those decisions.
But as everything if they do something stupid they lose credibility and customers. This is one of those instances in which they changed the rules in a way that made no clear sense and they will be remembered for that.
Correct.
> this is probably going to happen with those IPOs
Not due to any index-following investor.
> SP500 can decide absolutely whatever they want
Yup, S&P 500 is a committee-based index.
> one of those instances in which they changed the rules in a way that made no clear sense and they will be remembered for that
S&P never changed the S&P 500's rules.
NASDAQ 100 did. But from what I can tell, that was a brilliant piece of marketing. Nobody talked about them before. (QQQQ doesn't appear to have gained or lost net assets in that time, which isn't unexpected, it's a volatile fund.)
Yes. For their total-market fund. That makes sense. (CRSP is probably the most-significant index to make the change. But even then, it won't be a significant source of demand. Total market means lots of components.)
These capitalists are taking advantage of the corrupt administration in charge at the moment (not that a blue admin would be that much better), but they can get away with almost everything at the moment. Keep your head on a swivel, the billionaire class knows they don't have to worry about going to jail for the next few years and they'll make sure to screw everyone they possibly can to satisfy their endless greed.
Death to the fascist insect that feeds on the blood of the people.
There wasn't. A consultation was rejected. It happens all the time. If S&P management had a say, they would have wanted SpaceX included.
Once the SEC declares a registration statement "effective," the company is subject to the Exchange Act's reporting requirements. Theoretically one can do this and not list one's shares. That's dumb, so nobody does it.
In practice, we'll get a couple weeks to possibly days ahead of the listing. That process is partly governed by the SEC accepting the company's S-1. It's mostly down to negotiations between the company, its underwriters and IPO investors.
I’m not clear how much crossover demand there is between SX and Anthropic/oAI — that seems like the more interesting question. I’m guessing if we had Anthropic/oAI launching at the same time we’d see some pretty interesting capital dynamics.
Don't we have exactly that? There are S-1 announcements for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Google is selling to raise money for infra (IIRC). There's an absurd amount of money flowing in at present (prospectively at least).
The media and market is hyping these three companies up to be all trillion dollar companies.
So the markets only "need to absorb" $75B when SpaceX IPOs, not its whole $1.7T valuation. At least until the lockup period expires.
Its Schrodinger's IPO: the space business is so successful how could you question the company's worth? You can't afford to miss out on the next biggest AI business to invest in!
What's going to happen is the music will stop and it's just a question of who cashed in when it does. OpenAI are easily the most vulnerable here.
Where we land remains to be seen.
I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.
The dot com bubble was basically based on regular people buying computers and internet service, and then using them to buy products they used to buy in stores.
To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.
I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped
Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.
My parents love using ChatGPT, asking it all kinds of questions. My mom discovered Claude and helps her immensely with her job - where she would have to take it home and work a few hours to be able to finish the tasks on her computer, as her company that still uses Office 98, now Claude does it in 5 minutes.
They fixed so many random issues using it, it is insane. My dad had a bike issue which would otherwise be solved by either trying to find obscure manuals from 20 years ago on random forums with me translating it from english to our language, or by taking it to a mechanic which could take months. This way, he just snapped a few photos, said what the problem is, and in a few minutes he had the fix.
I've built software that uses LLM's for a specific usecase - besides general adoption, professionals in the field contacted me and thanked me for making their lives easier, as the tasks would often take a lot of manual work. These people are earning way more from using my software, than I am from their subscriptions, which is still about 20x more than my API costs are.
While most non-dev people are behind the curve, the impact it has on their lives is becoming bigger and bigger by the day.
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artifici...
Keep in mind that people said this before both of those crashes.That's the problem with bubbles. It's impossible to say if this time really IS different.
I study from reputable sources every day and never cease to be amazed by how many errors or misconceptions they have. Peer-reviewed articles, books from renowned scholars, news from major publications… regardless of the source, false information and contradictions accumulate. I’d wager that AI, besides helping me uncover these issues in the literature, has had a lower error rate than most of the materials that I read on a daily basis.
The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess.
But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Probably because they know there is a high chance of a big crash coming after.
I will not touch those IPOs with a 10 feet long pole. But unfortunately a lot of people are about to get burned.
My prediction is that this is what will be remembered as the last bit of exuberance before everything starts to unravel.
Books will be written about how insiders will be profiting millions by unloading those shares to the greatest fools and middle class america.
I think this is what's going on right now. But there are a variety of reasons that can drive IPO timing. Need for cash and owners needing liquidity being chief among them.
I'd also say that post-Covid, retail has become a commanding section of the American equity markets in a way I don't think they've been in my lifetime. As a result, every IPO from now on will have to target retail.
I really think what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops.
And You can only do that through a full IPO. All those companies had private secondary transaction but none of them were big enough to transfer the Trillions of $ required for the insiders to unload their bags.
How would you differentiate insiders needing to sell versus insiders needing to dump before a crash?
I remember when Uber and Airbnb and WeWork went public in quick succession. There were similar claims. WeWork never made it public. And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.
To answer this, just ask yourself how many of the insiders would have bought the stock at current IPO's price? Most insiders would probably never touch those stocks at this price. I know a couple people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are very clearly selling everything they can as soon as they can.
This is all a carefully orchestrated PR game that is relying on retail to be the ultimate fool. I guess to some level every IPO is like that (A PR game to hype the company).
But never before had we 3 mega IPOs happening at almost the exact same time with so much money to unload on retails with dubious ways to force funds to gobble them.
Most IPOs end up negative after the first few quarters (at least compared to the SP500). When we are talking about a 20B$ company it matters less than 5T$ being suddenly fully unloaded on the public.
> And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.
Did they? https://www.alphaspread.com/comparison/nasdaq/abnb/vs/indx/g...
The only way they might have is by getting the shares at the actual IPO price, and even then it's around the same as the SP500 return since then.
I think this is extremely common, if not necessary, part of a functioning market and price discovery. It happens with not just IPOs but also secondary offerings.
Some of this seems like dumb retail wanting to toughtlessly buy without consideration of risk.
If you are serious about this for Anthropic please drop me a line. (Not OpenAI.)
> never before had we 3 mega IPOs happening at almost the exact same time
Uber (May 2019), Airbnb (December 2020) and WeWork (scheduled 2019, SPAC 2021) were pretty closely bunched. And they were big for their time. Keep in mind that the money supply has expanded since then.
> Most IPOs end up negative after the first few quarters
Source?
There is an actual ETF tracking IPOs: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IPO/
Renaissance's IPO index seeks to "capture the essence of IPO activity and performance of newly public companies" [1]. It does not replicate an actual IPO investor's returns.
For example, it adds new issues approximately quarterly and never earlier than 5 days from IPO. This is important since it misses the pop. Mean (median) first-day returns on IPOs are 20% (7%) [2]. The average 3-year buy-and-hold return for all IPO investors 1980 to 2025 was 19.1%. Less than broad-market indices (though that margin shrinks for $1bn+ sales IPOs). But certainly not negative.
(Uber and Airbnb reflect this trend. Up since IPO. But, as you observe, below the S&P 500's returns even before taking into account total returns.)
[1] https://www.lseg.com/content/dam/ftse-russell/en_us/document...
[2] https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPO-Statistics.... 1980 to 2025; 30% (14%) for 2025
One of the more rational ideas I have seen of any kind of divination is that it provides a means of passing judgement over to a near seemingly random system. If you are reading tea leaves, doing an 'I Ching' divination, biobliomancy etc. that essentially provides a coin flip to make you go 'yes' or 'no' to an opportunity.
(I mean, I think this looks incredibly like a bubble too, but for completeness sake, that's the counterexample I can think of.)
It's also similar to 2024 when HN was sure that AI is a bubble.
Similar to 2025 when HN commentators were sure that AI is a bubble.
1000% gains later, HN will continue to identify patterns of 2000/2008 and are absolutely convinced it is a bubble
Note: If a company gains 1000% and loses 50%, you can't claim you were right.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have already gained 1000% since 2023 (In Anthropic's case almost 10,000%)
If I wanted blind pattern matching comments of dot-com bubble, I can just ask LLMs of 2023 like ChatGPT 3.5
We could very well go back to the 2021 valuations.
Maybe the solution to s..tposters is to do what Wikipedia does.
Some articles/topics are "protected" and new/unverified accounts cannot touch them.
S&P 500 said no. NASDAQ 100 is a tiny tech index. The retirement conspiracy could have been a thing, and its effect isn't zero, but oh my god was it overblown by the influencer crowd.
Guess who will hold the bag when it's all going downhill?
What?
The I in AGI has always stood for IPO.
If you think Sam Altman is bad for the industry, imagine what 200 of him will be like!
Is there a chart, somewhere, like a family tree, of what the Apple and Microsoft stock "ordinary millionaires" went on to do?
edit: id love to tally all the donations done by techies and compare them to how much of bezos fortune has ended up routed to charity via his ex
Altman and Thiel are also gay, so theres that too.
Also: Altman is married.
And last I checked, plenty of tech billionaires are married and by no stretch of the imagination stupid.
(Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)
Similar to Google with "Don't be evil". At least they got the decency to eventually remove it when they realized they were actually doing evil.
How is this not illegal? What prevents any nonprofit from doing this to sidestep its filing status and extract profit?
It can easily be that, if they believe that the capital it raises increases the long-term value of the company by a greater multiple than the proportion of the company that is lost from the nonprofit to outside investors.
The primary example of this is Novo Nordisk (the Ozempic company). Their largest shareholder is, through an intermediary, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is one of the largest charities in the world. Nordisk used to be a charity that owned 100% of it's own labs and facilities, but in 1989 they realized that they were just too small, and would get trampled by larger international players without greatly increasing their scope. So they made their subsidiary go public (through a complex merger, not an IPO), and now only own 28% of it, instead of 100%. But, in large part because of the capital that going public brought them, despite constantly distributing money for research and charity, that's 28% of a company that's more than 100x bigger that what they used to be. And they retained 77% voting control.
If the private subsidiary was doing semi-unrelated stuff to the goals of the non-profit, and using it to fund the non-profit, then your logic could make sense - for example if a cancer research charity owned a profitable business and funnelled the profits up to spend on research, great.
But in OpenAI's case, the claimed goals of the non-profit were essentially "do AI in a way that puts safety above profits". And whether or not one agrees with their previous approach to safety, or even whether safety needs to be cared about, it's undeniable that the for-profit business isn't acting as useful fundraising for the non-profit's goals, it's literally acting in the opposite direction.
It's generally not up to your or to me, it's up to the donors to the non-profit. If what you find to be undeniable is very much deniable to them, then that is their right.
The only question of public concern is whether OpenAI, Inc., a charity, meets the exemption requirements [1].
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
The rule is that the nonprofit and disqualified persons (mostly board members), cant own businesses together, well they can but not more than 35% of it together, and a max of 20% can have voting capability
The consequences arent immediate, non profits have 3 years to correct this
Now in the tech industry, getting VCs involved is already the plan from day one and founders get diluted, so getting below 35% is either easy, or easy within 3 years
so they’re fine
there’s a lot of things they can all do to deal with the share consolidation
1) In order to fund research - this stuff costs 10s of billions of dollars - everyone, from Ilya, to Elon, to Sam - all agreed that they would require a profit-arm to raise money. Nobody was going to sponsor that 10s of billions of dollars to a non-profit.
2) The non profit is still there - and controls the commercial element.
That will be especially untrue after IPO when shareholders can claim there are fiduciary responsibilities that conflict with the non profit goals.
The for-profit has fiduciary responsibility to the non-profit as well as other shareholders. The IPO doesn't really change that.
The non-profit hasn't controlled squat since they tried and failed to fire Sam Altman.
How much has MacKenzie Scott donated to non-profits again?
Seems like such a claim is on thin ice.
The for-profit (OpenAI Group PBC) is what's filing the S-1 Draft.
The OpenAI Foundation also exclusively appoints the board of the OpenAI Group PBC and can replace directors at any time.
https://openai.com/our-structure/
(I work at OpenAI, but I am not a lawyer and am not speaking on behalf of OpenAI - just sharing my personal understanding.)
Isn't it hard to write this with a straight face?
The corporation selling shares is subject to normal corporate tax regime
The real answer to your question is that non profits can own shares, and there is no legal difference between passive investment of other publicly traded companies and highly consolidated shares of a private company. In the US it is seen as merely happenstance that we have such a liquid market where the shares themselves can rapidly change in value and create profits, but there is nothing controversial about that.
Interest in the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPO is already dropping
“Under the JOBS Act, it has been possible since April 2012 for ‘emerging growth companies’ to file a Form S-1 on a confidential basis, only making the contents public 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO” [1]. Since 2017 and 2025 it’s been available to basically all companies [2].
Withdrawing an IPO looks bad. Confidential filing lets issuers start and have the option to abort the process without taking reputational damage. (The specifics of OpenAI’s filing, and any back and forth with the SEC, remains confidential.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_S-1
[2] https://www.sec.gov/about/divisions-offices/division-corpora...
Once it no longer is being drafted—and agreed upon by all parties to meet the needed regulatory standards—it will become final and be publicly published.
So a simple valuation would be something like Current Cash + Assets + Expected Future cash - (Expenses + Risk)
Failing companies sometimes trade below cash value. OP's basically creating a rule by which only failing companies are allowed to go public. (Or those who have paid a king's ransom to a megabank.)
your suggestion makes no sense