Travis Hoium

So while I agree with Lou's take that the IPO for whether it be OpenAI or SpaceX or others, maybe the best time to do it was yesterday because the market valuations right now obviously are still relatively strong.

At the same time, they have a lot of access to capital.

There's a lot of people, including Tesla shareholders to some extent, that are willing to help fund operations in the interim.

The cash crunch hasn't hit for these companies yet.

I actually really don't think so.

I think it's actually funny to conceptually think about the idea that a company needs to go public in order to access capital.

I mean, when you think about the size of SpaceX or XAI, these are huge, huge companies.

OpenAI, you name it.

These are companies, private enterprises that have managed to fund themselves with private capital for

a very long time, an unusually long time, especially given the size of their companies.

Historically, we saw companies go public at much smaller valuations because they needed access to capital.

Private markets have been willing to help fund these companies and billionaires to some extent, and even public companies.

Like I said, Tesla is a funding vehicle for Musk's other cash-losing projects, given how much capital the business has access to.

These are all ways that help keep

private companies private.

So it's cachet that you get when you go public.

And at some extent, I expect that the private market funding does run out.

But that's why these companies are not running to the IPO market.

That's why when we talk about a SpaceX IPO, we heard about this in 2025.

We're not talking about 2026 for a potential IPO.