Wallace-Wells: And they’re actually trying to relax some of the conditions to buy, right? To allow smaller investors in, which tells you something about the kind of buyer that they’re hoping to sell to.
Sarin: And there’s so many pieces of this that, I think, are so important for how the market functions, and for actually regular people and their portfolios, that are really important for your listeners to grapple with. One is that, part of what is happening, just because of the scale of these I.P.O.s that we started by talking about, is they’re going to instantaneously be a really significant part of household portfolios through things like their retirement accounts. And the reason for that is, because as these giant I.P.O.s are happening, the stock market indices are actually relaxing their own rules with respect to how long it takes in order for companies to get onto the index.
And so, the idea that 15 days after SpaceX I.P.O.s, it’s essentially going to be part of all of our retirement portfolios; and all of our index investing is actually really consequential for households. And in general, these I.P.O.s and the concentration that they’re going to represent — even before you had these I.P.O.s, by the way, something like 60 percent of stock market growth last year was about just a few technology companies — that trend is going to accelerate in a world with these mammoth I.P.O.s coming in the second half of this year.
And so, that too has really consequential effects for household portfolios, because, in some sense, it means that we’re all massively exposed to the idea that there might eventually be — and if what history tells us is true is, in fact, true, that when you have these types of technological changes, even ones that are hugely beneficial, and bring a lot of welfare, and a lot of economic growth — things like the internet, things like the railroad — they come with a bubble that eventually pops, and households are going to be massively exposed to that. And more exposed now that these companies are going public than they were a few weeks ago when all of them were private.
Wallace-Wells: So, one thing you’re talking about is that we’re all, collectively, going to be pulled into this investment cycle. And I wanted to pull back, a little bit, from the question of the I.P.O. and talk about the political economy of A.I. at the moment, generally; because, at the same time that we’re having the prospect of all of us getting enlisted in this profit machine, we’re also seeing huge amounts of public backlash, particularly around data centers. There’s broad unease about the future of an A.I.-powered economy. We see Bernie Sanders proposing the American government taking a 50 percent ownership stake in these labs. We see Donald Trump making similar noises, and the A.I. labs themselves saying, we’re open to this; kind of like, let’s talk about it.