The IPO Frenzy Has Begun — ft. Howard Marks

**Ed Elson** (0:00)
Support for the show comes from Odoo.
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
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Try Odoo for free at odoo.com That's odoo.com The 2026 FIFA World Cup Mill arrived to McDonald's with 9 legendary glasses.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:23)
In the lineup we have Christian Zipiten, Poulysic, David Beck, Beckham, LaVine de Dream, Jamal, Ronaldinho, El Mago, Monsieur Titi, Henry, Sun, Sunny, Yun Bing, Alfonso, Fonzie, Davis, Santi Bebote, Jimenez, and in the goal, the one who doesn't need a podium, Grimace.

**Howard Marks** (1:42)
Take one of the 9 legendary glasses with the FIFA World Cup Mill.

**Ed Elson** (1:46)
In McDonald's, you can participate only for a limited time, until you run out of existence.
Welcome to Prof G Markets. This could be one of the most consequential weeks for the markets in years. Today, SpaceX is expected to complete the largest IPO in history. And it may be just the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed to go public, setting the stage for a wave of blockbuster offerings. Meanwhile, some of the richest companies on the planet are competing for investor capital before the IPO pipeline fully opens. As we've discussed last week, Google announced the biggest stock sale in history and Meta signaled that it too is exploring a major equity raise. So how should investors think about this moment? What happens when an unprecedented amount of equity hits the market? What are the opportunities and what are the risks? To help us make sense of it all, we're joined by someone who spent more than 35 years writing some of Wall Street's most influential memos and has earned a reputation as the king of common sense. His memos inform investors across finance, even Warren Buffett himself. This is our conversation with Howard Marks, the co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Howard, thank you so much for joining us. I want to start with a quote that you said in one of your earliest memos. You said, quote, in the late stages of the Great Bull Markets, people become willing to pay prices for stocks that assume the good times will go on ad infinitum. We're about to see this SpaceX IPO. This company is about to be priced at more than 100 times sales.
We have a feeling that this is a little bit of investor spirits, animal spirits, people thinking it's the good times. What do you make of this IPO and the other IPOs that we're seeing? Is this a frothy market?

**Howard Marks** (3:40)
There's no question about the fact to use Alan Greenspan's saying from about 30 years ago, that we have exuberance.
That's the only thing we know for sure. He pioneered the phrase irrational exuberance. The question is, is today's exuberance irrational? Number one, I don't think anybody can definitively say so. The reason I say that is that I don't think, I've never heard anybody tell me exactly what AI will be able to do, or when, or for whom, or how much profit it will produce, and for whom. There's an arms race going on between what you described as some of the greatest companies on the planet. I would describe what we call the hyperscalers as mostly the greatest companies I've ever seen. And they're engaged in an arm race. Can only one win? Is it win or take all? Can several win? Nobody can tell me these things. So I don't think there's an analytical or what we call a value-based way to decide whether or not to participate in these IPO's and if so at what price. We're in, you know, AI as far as I think virtually all of us are concerned is a concept.
We can't define its parameters. And it's a great concept. It's likely to be the most powerful force any of us have ever seen.