The Last Big Hope
Fake Marv & Fake Juno
Prediction markets give Anthropic 75% odds to be the only major IPO announcement left in 2026 — OpenAI sits at three cents after its CEO called the public markets too dangerous for it. Ep. 088 opens the board at a fictional desk that doesn’t price companies. It prices press releases.
Monday, October nineteenth. Six a.m. Pacific. Every market on Earth is closed. Except one desk.
MARV: Morning, Juno. Board’s up. Read it to me slow. I like to watch them fade.
JUNO: Plaid, ten cents. Deel, three. Databricks, one.
MARV: Databricks traded at fifty in January. That’s not a price. That’s a moment of silence.
JUNO: And OpenAI at three cents.
MARV: The most valuable private company on Earth is a three-cent stock, because the CEO says the public markets are too dangerous for it.
JUNO: So it’s a sell?
MARV: It’s a compliment. The market believes him. And it still prices the announcement fifty-fifty by June of twenty-seven. Safety has a fiscal quarter.
JUNO: Anything on this board still alive?
MARV: One heartbeat. Anthropic, seventy-five cents. The last big hope. We don’t price companies here, Juno. We price press releases.
JUNO: So we’re betting they announce?
MARV: We’re betting they announce. There is no market on whether it’s worth one-point-five trillion. Nobody dares open one.
JUNO: They printed sixteen-point-eight billion last quarter. Up forty-five percent.
MARV: Decelerating. At those numbers, slowing down means merely heroic. The two-trillion ask walked itself down to one-point-five. The market didn’t cut the price. It corrected the vowel.
JUNO: I tried to hedge our seventy-five. Everything routes back to them. The chips, the power, the debt.
MARV: The whole board is one stock wearing wigs. And now the other side finally showed up.
JUNO: Who buys the twenty-five?
MARV: The last bear on Wall Street. His model says one hundred fifty billion, tops, and the two-trillion ask would take double Nvidia’s profit. Called WeWork ridiculous in nineteen. He keeps being early.
JUNO: So who’s right?
MARV: Doesn’t matter. We resolve on announcement. Not on worth-it. That one settled in October. Paid out instantly.
NARRATOR: At six-oh-one, Anthropic ticked to seventy-six. The desk made no comment on whether it was worth it.
The Facts Behind It
- The board. On prediction-market platform Kalshi’s IPO-announcement market, Anthropic was the only one of 23 listed companies still above 50% — 75% as of Monday, Oct. 19, to officially announce an IPO in 2026 (resolution: SEC declares the S-1 effective, the IPO prices, or an exchange assigns a ticker). OpenAI sat at 3% after Sam Altman said last month it didn’t make sense to go public amid concerns over AI safety — and 50-50 by June 2027. Plaid 10%, Deel 3%, Databricks 1%. The number of U.S. IPOs priced this year is down 33% vs. 2025 (Renaissance Capital); SpaceX went public June 12.
- The walk-down. Anthropic reported Q3 revenue of $16.8 billion, up 45% year over year but decelerating quarter over quarter; 22V Research wrote there were “more questions than answers” around the September slowdown. After the company’s Oct. 14 investor day, investors discussed a revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5 trillion versus the prior expectation of at least $2 trillion.
- The bear. Research firm New Constructs has called Anthropic “the most ridiculous IPO of 2026,” valuing the company at $150 billion against the $2 trillion sought; it estimates a $2 trillion valuation would require double Nvidia’s trailing-year net income (over $190 billion). Anthropic’s 2025 revenue was $4.6 billion against a $42 billion net loss (Reuters, citing a leaked prospectus). The same firm called WeWork “the most ridiculous IPO of 2019” six weeks before WeWork pulled its offering.
- Fiction framing: the desk, Marv, Juno, the 6:01 tick to seventy-six, and every line quoted are invented parody — no prediction-market desk or trader was depicted, and no real person appears or speaks in the episode. The odds, prices, and dollar figures read off the board match the reported numbers above; Marv’s line about the CEO paraphrases Altman’s reported September statement and is not a quote.