Howard Marks, the co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management and one of the world's most closely watched value investors, has publicly branded the current rush of AI company listings a "money-losing bubble". His warning targets the three biggest initial public offerings in recent memory: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all of which are loss-making despite carrying combined valuations that could exceed $3 trillion once all three are trading on public markets.
A $3 Trillion Bet on Future Profits
SpaceX set an initial share price of $135 at its debut, placing the company's overall valuation at $1.77 trillion. Shares surged once trading opened, pushing the figure past $2 trillion, according to reporting by ms.now. Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude assistant, has filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is eyeing a listing as early as October. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is preparing its own offering and was last valued at around $852 billion following a $122 billion fundraising round, Fortune reports.
The scale of the wave is striking. The entire US IPO market raised just $45 billion across all of 2025. Goldman Sachs analysts, cited by Reuters, project that 2026 IPO proceeds could reach approximately $160 billion, and that forecast was made before the current trio fully entered the picture. Combined, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic represent roughly 10% of the entire current US stock market capitalisation.
“"At conventional valuation multiples, these companies would need to generate approximately $150 billion in combined annual earnings to justify their target valuations — a remarkable figure given that they currently lose approximately $20 billion collectively each year." — Intellectia AI analysis”
Circular Money and Dot-Com Echoes
At the heart of the sceptics' case is what analysts call circular financing. Established corporations such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are pouring capital into chip manufacturer Nvidia, which in turn has invested heavily in OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which also purchase Nvidia chips. Yale Insights has described this loop plainly: the lines between revenue and equity are blurring among a small group of highly influential technology companies, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
The parallels to the dot-com era are increasingly difficult to ignore. Wikipedia's entry on the theorised AI bubble notes that in late 2025, the top five companies made up 30% of the S&P 500 and 20% of the MSCI World index, the greatest market concentration in half a century. The S&P 500's Shiller price-to-earnings ratio, a long-term valuation measure, exceeded 40 for the first time since the dot-com crash. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk has argued that the overheated AI sector was born from years of near-zero interest rates, and that persistently high rates will remain a headwind for loss-making growth companies.
“"The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s." — Torsten Sløk, Chief Economist, Apollo Global Management”
The Bull Case: Real Revenue, Disciplined Capital
Not every analyst shares Marks's alarm. BlackRock's director of investment strategy Mark Peterson argues that today's technology leaders are anchored by genuine profitability, disciplined capital allocation, and broad adoption, distinguishing them from the purely speculative companies of the late 1990s. Fidelity points out that most AI-related capital investment is funded through retained earnings and corporate cash rather than debt, making the sector less vulnerable to liquidity shocks than dot-com era firms were. The S&P 500 Information Technology Index trades at around 30 times forward earnings, elevated but well below the 55 times multiple reached at the dot-com peak.
For international investors, the stakes go beyond American equity indices. The MSCI World index, widely used by European pension funds and institutional portfolios, already carries significant concentration in the same handful of US mega-cap technology firms. If the AI IPO wave triggers a rotation out of existing technology holdings, the displacement could ripple through global markets. As Yahoo Finance notes, the coming months will test whether investors are pricing in a long-term transformation or whether expectations have simply become too ambitious to survive contact with quarterly earnings reports.
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