Hola,

So... you might have noticed. SpaceX raised $75bn, breaking all the records, traditions, and some would say good manners.

The biggest IPO in history.

We are officially entering the AI phase of the global economy. It is finally real, tokens are now competing with hydrocarbons for the title of "most real thing in the room."

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceX are, between them, planning to raise somewhere north of $200bn in equity, possibly closer to $300bn once OpenAI's number is known, within a very short window.

They are all racing for the same pockets. And racing to get in front of each other reaching into those pockets.

SpaceX got there first.

Depending on which source you use, the entire US IPO market in a normal year raises around $30–40bn. Across the last 25 years, the single record year was 2021, when 311 companies raised $120bn between them.

311. Three hundred and eleven. Dreihundertelf. Trescientos once. Триста одиннадцать.

Now we have four companies chasing perhaps $300bn. Two and a half times the record. Between them. In months.

Absurd? Or the new normal?

Someone with one of the sharpest insights into the world of money I have ever encountered once told me: to make truly serious money, two things have to be true.

As in the voodoo from the movies. In our context… the feeling that what you are dealing with is magic, not business. That something powerful is happening and nobody can quite explain how it works or how it makes money. Our reality? Check. Nobody actually knows how this whole thing pays for itself yet.

Fear of missing out. Also check. On every level. In every boardroom. In every exec call. Nobody wants to be the one who sat it out.

For those who can generate both it might mean $300bn even.

Especially in a world where the institutions writing the cheques are not gambling with their own money. They are allocating other people's, much of it ultimately backstopped, one way or another, by the rest of us.

So what does it mean for those of us who are neither rich enough nor inside enough to play the game? The shifting rules, the traditions, the perceptions… what do we do with them?

Do we, the modest managers, execs and consultants, in our nice suits, wearing submariners, in our leased 911s — drink the Kool-Aid and ask for a refill? Or do we swing the other way, become contrarians and retrogrades, call everyone involved a fraud, and then quietly edit our rants in GPT before posting?

Maybe neither.

The Meme Guide to Management has a principle we hold to: moral seriousness. And part of moral seriousness is honesty… which we think is a genuine, underrated skill in the modern workplace. And anyone being honest right now would say something simple: I don't know.

I don't know what's going on. I don't know how it ends. I don't know what any of it is really worth.

But here is the problem. We have been conditioned… by school, by university, by the whole fake-it-till-you-make-it world… to pretend we do know. Since childhood, "I don't know" meant an F on the grade sheet. The system beat the phrase out of us. It shamed us out of it.

But you and I both know that, most of the time, we don't know. And as students of the craft of management, we have to be honest about that, with our people, with our stakeholders, and most importantly with ourselves.

There are enough people out there ready to deceive us. We do not need to join them.

Talk soon,

Sultanbek