[altmanaltman]

An IPO doesn't mean public is forced to buy the stock. There is a choice for funds or individuals and if they chose to buy it, they should be allowed to in an open market.

The other side of this are companies like Uber where (if we go by your logic), the public markets made a killing betting on a company that had massive losses. Should Uber also be blocked from an IPO even though objectively it turned out great?

Investing and markets will always decide between risk and reward. The risk of OpenAI is that it will never find profitablity but the potential rewards outweigh that in the current market perception.

In fact, the argument kind of shifts here, OpenAI can afford to IPO at this condition and still expect strong subscription precisely because its OpenAI. If it was some idk cooking appliance company with no exponential future payoff, the market would laugh and reject that IPO.

They can do that to OpenAI too but all signs say they wouldn't. You can still short the stock once it hits public if you really believe in the downfall of OAI in the future.

[HDBaseT]

You will be left holding the bag with regards to your 401k, Superannuation and other non-directly managed investments.

[appplication]

Except certain indices are indeed forced to buy if the stock otherwise meets inclusion criteria, this was a somewhat controversial topic with the recent spacex IPO.

[altmanaltman]

Yes if a company's market value exceeds a certain size, it will be considered to be included in indices, most of which track these things automatically.

They have to apply the rules consistently otherwise it wont make any sense to have these indicies right? Spacex got rejected in one of the big indicies because it was not profitable while it got accepted in another. You can buy from both as an investor or a fund manager. If you think one of them is wrong, it is in your interest to switch. If you don't switch then you indirectly don't see anything wrong with it.

Going back to the point, if we want a free market, it has to be free for all. Spacex can go to 0 tomorrow and cause markets to implode, it can also surge 10x over the next 5 years causing everyone in the market to get richer or it can just drag for 10s of years in the same level.

But you and I do not know the future. We cannot block a company from IPOing just because we think it will fail in the future. If it meets all the existing regs, it should be allowed to IPO. If you want to change the regs, thats a different discussion but one i fundamentally disagree with personally. I think the market should be able to take risks and explore potential otherwise we will stagnate.