Andrew here. A lot is being made of OpenAI’s confidential filing to go public — and we get into all the details below. But the truth is that OpenAI’s decision to go public, potentially this fall, rests more on the outcome of SpaceX’s I.P.O. on Friday than on just about anything else.
Dozens of companies are watching that I.P.O. as an indicator of whether they should race to the public market or hold back. And make sure to check out why one of Sam Bankman-Fried’s former cellmates is speaking out against his efforts to seek a pardon.
Big questions for the A.I. race to go public
Days before SpaceX is expected to begin trading on the public markets, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab led by Sam Altman, announced that it had filed confidentially for what would almost certainly be another blockbuster I.P.O.
But with three A.I. titans — SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic — now officially seeking to go public, the move raises big questions about what that will mean for the industry and for investors.
Is OpenAI ready? Though it has taken an important step toward an I.P.O., OpenAI didn’t commit to a timetable for listing its shares. “It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” it said in a statement on Monday.
That could include managing its commitment to invest $115 billion over the next four years, largely on data centers to power its A.I. tools. Those plans reportedly led OpenAI’s own C.F.O., Sarah Friar, to question whether the company would be ready to go public this year.
Who stands to profit the most from an OpenAI listing? The company has raised $180 billion over the past 11 years, making its investor base a who’s who of venture capitalists.
Early investors (who could win especially big) include:
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Khosla Ventures, OpenAI’s first venture backer
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Microsoft
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Thrive Capital
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Andreessen Horowitz
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Sequoia Capital
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angel investors, including the tech moguls Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.
Is there enough investor capacity for three giant I.P.O.s, potentially in rapid succession? SpaceX’s offering, which is expected to raise about $74.4 billion, has already drawn enormous interest, including from big institutional funds and from retail investors (who are expected to account for up to 30 percent of the deal).
Experts say the stock markets can handle that demand. But add on blockbuster deals by Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which could come before year-end, and the picture gets cloudier. (Ali Ghodsi, the chief executive of the A.I. start-up Databricks, which is expected to eventually stage an I.P.O., said last week that 2026 would be “a terrible year to go public.”)
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Retail investors are starting to worry, according to Ivan Cosovic, the managing director of Breakout Point, a market data firm that tracks investor sentiment. Especially bearish retail investors see the three I.P.O.s as marking “the actual top” of the stock market, he told DealBook.
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Cosovic added that some retail investors saw SpaceX, which some analysts view as extremely overvalued, as “an opportunity to make a quick buck” if they can get in at the I.P.O. price and quickly resell their shares. “They see the game being played, mock it openly and then plan to play it anyway,” he said.
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Many of those traders, he said, see OpenAI as a “retail meme trade.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration names major Chinese companies as security threats. Alibaba and the electric vehicle maker BYD were included on a watchlist of businesses believed to be aiding China’s military. This would impose significant restrictions on their ability to operate in the U.S. (They couldn’t work with the military, for instance.) The move drew sharp criticism from Beijing and may further stress relations between the countries.
A federal judge rejects a $100,000 fee for H1-B visas. Judge Leo Sorokin ruled in Massachusetts that the Trump administration’s plan for skilled-worker visas appeared to usurp Congress’s taxation powers and must be voided. The ruling is a win for companies who rely on the visa to hire skilled foreign labor; the White House indicated it would appeal.
Apple formally releases its artificial intelligence catch-up plan. At the tech giant’s annual developer conference on Monday, executives — including Tim Cook, in his last appearance at the event as C.E.O. — unveiled a new, A.I.-powered version of its Siri digital assistant, emphasizing privacy and on-device processing. (Apple’s shares fell after the event, as they often do.) Separately, the company said Siri AI wouldn’t be available in the E.U. amid a dispute with regulators there.
Bankman-Fried’s Hail Mary
President Trump has pardoned more than 1,500 people so far during his second term in office. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced co-founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is hoping to join that list.
Bankman-Fried has applied for a “pardon after completion of sentence,” according to the Justice Department, and his status is “pending.” It’s a long shot — and it may revive a debate about his legacy, including what would have been a series of hugely successful venture-capital bets.
The background: In 2023, Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering after prosecutors charged him with stealing billions from FTX customers, plowing that money into FTX operations and investments.
Bankman-Fried and his parents have aggressively campaigned for a pardon. But Trump told The Times this year that he didn’t plan to grant Bankman-Fried clemency.
An unexpected acquaintance of Bankman-Fried argued he shouldn’t be pardoned: Michael Avenatti. He’s the former star lawyer who represented the adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against Trump, and he was later convicted of attempting to extort Nike.
In a post on X, Avenatti wrote that the former crypto mogul refused to accept responsibility for his actions:
Not once did he admit he’d done anything wrong — even after I told him repeatedly he could never begin to redeem himself without that acknowledgment.
You don’t earn a pardon when you can’t admit, even to yourself, that you did wrong.
Bankman-Fried’s legacy is still being debated. Had FTX not imploded, he might be regarded now as one of the most successful investors ever. Among the companies he backed:
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Anthropic, the artificial intelligence giant
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Cursor, the A.I. coding tool
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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket-and-A.I. titan
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Robinhood, the online brokerage
The Anthropic and Cursor bets would have been especially lucrative, given how early Bankman-Fried invested in them. Forbes calculates that his Anthropic stake alone would now be worth about $80 billion and the Cursor one about $3 billion.
Yet the trustee overseeing FTX’s unwinding quickly and aggressively sold off the company’s remains, including those stakes. Creditors, including customers, ended up being paid back in full — but could they have earned more if FTX assets hadn’t been sold off at fire-sale prices?
Pratt falls short
Spencer Pratt’s run for Los Angeles mayor was powered by outrage and online memes and unexpectedly buoyed by an array of deep-pocketed business donors.
Yet it wasn’t enough to overcome political math.
Pratt probably won’t advance to the mayoral runoff. The Associated Press determined on Monday that Mayor Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, a progressive city councilwoman, will face off in November.
As of last night, Bass had 34.3 percent of the vote, Raman 28.5 percent and Pratt 25.8 percent.
The results cap an improbable run by Pratt, a reality-TV star whose candidacy was initially seen as a curiosity. Pratt, whose home burned down in the 2025 Pacific Palisades wildfires, built his campaign around rage against Bass: her handling of the wildfires, a rise in homelessness and more.
His bombastic persona and promises to make Los Angeles friendlier to business, along with fan A.I. videos, helped him raise millions, including from well-known corporate leaders like the investor Dan Loeb and the entertainment moguls Bobby Kotick, Haim Saban and Lucian Grainge.
While Pratt initially appeared to perform strongly in last week’s primary, his lead over Raman was likely to disappear because Los Angeles is a heavily Democratic city and Californians tend to vote by mail.
What’s next? Pratt has promoted baseless conspiracy theories that homeless people were illicitly voting for Raman. He reminded supporters that not all ballots had been counted.
A big question is how will his supporters feel if Bass or Raman wins in November. Many of Pratt’s backers have shared his anger at Bass and at the city’s center-left Democratic establishment. But some also worry about Raman’s more progressive views.
Meta’s big job-training bet
Artificial intelligence isn’t exactly riding high with the general public right now as people fear the technology’s effect on jobs, communities and more.
Now, one of the most aggressive hyperscalers, Meta, is announcing a program meant to create jobs — and perhaps address concerns about its A.I. build-out.
Meta on Monday unveiled “America’s Workforce Academy,” a five-week program that trains people to become fiber technicians, welders, plumbers and electricians. Graduates will be guaranteed a job at a Meta data center.
The tech giant said that this was the biggest private-sector commitment to skilled trades with a job guarantee in U.S. history. (Other corporate giants, like BlackRock, have announced similar job training without the guarantee.) Meta created a smaller program before, called Level-Up, that trained fiber installers and received 35,000 applications in its first week.
The program has big ambitions. It will be funded by an investment of $115 million in its first year, and it will cover tuition, airfare, lodging and a daily stipend.
Graduates will receive credentials recognized by different employers and industries, and they will not be obligated to stick with a Meta-related project.
The program appears to have been formed with politics in mind. It will start with test sites in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas. If you guessed that these were all locations for Meta data centers, you’re right — though Meta also says that that’s where a lot of the potential talent and demand is.
Meta’s partners include:
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CBRE, the real estate giant
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Associated Builders and Contractors
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National Urban League
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the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, chambers of commerce in Louisiana and Ohio and an economic development corporation in Indiana.
A.I. and data centers could use positive P.R. A poll in March by Gallup found that seven in 10 respondents opposed the building of computing hubs, known to be expensive, noisy and resource-hungry, in their local communities.
And more than a third of registered voters who participated in a poll by The Times and Siena College last month said that A.I. was “mostly bad.”
THE SPEED READ
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