The IPO Frenzy Has Begun — ft. Howard Marks

Howard Marks has spent decades watching investors convince themselves that "this time it's different." Now, with SpaceX expected to complete the largest IPO in history, Anthropic and OpenAI filing to go public, and hyperscalers competing for investor capital, Marks sees the pattern repeating. But he refuses to call it a bubble definitively. "The question is, is today's exuberance irrational?" he asks. "Number one, I don't think anybody can definitively say so."

The Unknowable Frontier

Marks's central argument is that AI represents something genuinely new in the history of technological innovation — not because it's more powerful than railroads, radio, computers, or the internet, but because it's less specifiable. With railroads, investors knew they carried goods and people from point to point. With radio, they understood it transmitted messages. With AI, nobody can answer the basic questions: What will it be able to do, when, for whom, and how much profit will it produce?