$300 billion or $97.4 billion? Is this the start of history’s biggest IPO?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

• The billionaires spat continues
• The price is right (and wrong)
• Barney the surgeon

If that’s enough to get the biggest IPO in history going, read on…

AI Collision 💥

I don’t trust OpenAI.

I don’t trust Sam Altman.

These aren’t my words. These are the words of Sam Altman’s arch nemesis, Elon Musk.

I’m sure one of them thinks of themselves as Superman, the other Lex Luthor. Maybe they both think that.

But these are arguably the two most powerful men in tech right now (outside of Jensen Huang who’s probably at God-level) having a very public, and very childish, spat.

Don’t you just love it when billionaires spit the dummy out?

Hang on a sec, I feel like we’ve been here before. Oh yeah, that’s because we have just over two weeks ago.

Well, Musk and Altman are at it again. Musk is annoyed that OpenAI is not so “open”. A reminder: Musk started OpenAI and it was a non-profit open-source organisation to begin with – hence the “Open” in OpenAI.

While Altman has claimed to not make money off OpenAI, his $3 million Koenigsegg Regera begs to differ.

To amplify the shift of OpenAI to CashMoneyBagsAI, SoftBank (one of the partners in the $500 billion Stargate project) is said to be investing $40 billion in OpenAI, which gives it a valuation of around $300 billion.

Then a day after that was reported, new reports emerged that Musk had made an unsolicited offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion.

Altman’s response was swift, and Musk’s response to that response was even swifter…

This spat continued as it has done for a while now, with Elon posting a video of Altman with the comment, “Scam Altman”.

As this childish mess plays out, it does leave a burning question in my mind. What is the valuation of OpenAI – what is it really worth?

SoftBank is notoriously good at overpaying for things. Two of its worst decisions being a huge investment in WeWork and selling its 5% ownership of Nvidia around six years ago. Ouch!

It does appear that a $300 billion valuation for OpenAI is a lot. Even Musk’s $97 billion offer is high considering the stacking losses OpenAI is racking up.

Elon’s deal was declined. The SoftBank thing may or may not happen. OpenAI is moving to a for-profit model and it is growing at a speed that outpaces all previous foundational technologies.

You know what it screams to me? IPO. I think 2025 is going to see an acceleration in IPOs, from robotics to AI and semiconductor tech. I think an OpenAI IPO seems like the logical step here – and if it does, it’ll be the biggest IPO in history.

Maybe, just maybe, it’ll be a bargain. If it’s down around Elon’s price that is. But if it IPOs at SoftBank’s price… it might just be one to avoid at all costs.

PS You may have noticed that AI Collision 💥 is now hitting your inbox DAILY! That’s because we’ve decided that we’re going to condense our sends but ramp up the frequency.

So going forward you’ll be seeing AI Collision 💥 hit your inbox every day (except Saturday and Sunday) with the most important thing to know in AI. That keeps us nimble, fresh and relevant rather than having to space things out for twice a week.

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Speaking of record breaking IPOs, until OpenAI does IPO, you should look to prepare for the other record-breaking IPO…

The largest IPO in history is coming

Elon Musk’s $180 billion Starlink IPO may launch as soon before the end of May. Most investors will only get in after it goes public – when the big money’s already been made. But you don’t have to wait. Discover a way you could position yourself to potentially profit before the IPO right from your brokerage account with as little as £40.

Capital at risk.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

Boom 📈

• Cyngn (NASDAQ:CYN) up 129%
• iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) up 18%
• Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 12%

Bust 📉

• Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) down 16%
• Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) down 10%
• AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) down 7%

From the hive mind 🧠

• This is the stuff that AI nightmares are made of. It’s one of the biggest worries that AI sceptics have: the ability for AI to replicate itself and therefore identify that it is a superior being to humans. Enjoy.
• Does anyone really know what Salesforce does? It’s as elusive as Palantir. Well, to muddy the waters even further, it is set to invest $500 million into AI in Saudi Arabia.
• My son had some more questions about space the other day. Questions I didn’t have the answers to, and neither did the books we have at home. So he asked if he could ask “Alexa”. I said, don’t bother mate, Alexa isn’t AI like CoPilot or ChatGPT. Well, soon, Alexa will be and it may change the direction of Amazon forever.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Weirdest AI image of the day

Barney the Dinosaur performing brain surgery with oversized, novelty-sized tools – r/weirddalle

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision