What No One Is Pricing In.
The grown-up corner of the magazine. Structural risks the market has not priced, stated plainly and labelled honestly. Where a claim is unverified, it says so — that is the point of the column.
Issue №3 · 16 June 2026 · The IPO Special
Read in Issue №3 →-
The compute margin is moving the wrong way.
OpenAI's inference gross margin reportedly halved in 2025, from roughly two-thirds to roughly one-third, as model size outgrew chip-cost amortisation. Anthropic and the xAI division of SpaceX face the same physics. If a $1bn quarterly compute bill grows 50% in 2027 while revenue grows 30%, the operating-leverage story embedded in the multiples does not work. The S-1s do not project compute trajectories beyond two years. The bankers' models, we understand, do.
Unverified at IPO level — visible at unit-economics level -
The cloud invoice is the cap table.
Anthropic has committed $100bn of AWS spend over ten years. OpenAI's Microsoft contract, per filings during last year's Musk litigation, contains minimum-commit clauses. SpaceX, post-xAI merger, has folded NVIDIA exposure onto the SpaceX balance sheet. The compute partners are not arm's-length suppliers. They are co-issuers of the equity, without sitting on the cap table. If a single partner renegotiates, the listed entity's economics shift faster than any S-1 risk factor admits.
Unverified — visible in public commitments -
The dual-class control is non-diversifiable.
SpaceX's amended S-1 leaves Mr Musk more than 82% of the vote. If Mr Musk is hit by a bus, departs to Mars, or simply tires of the company, the residual reprices. Public shareholders have no governance lever — and, by mechanical index inclusion at $1.77tn, no choice about owning the equity. The risk is, in the most literal sense, forced.
Unverified — structurally obvious