The Liquidity Wave — AI IPOs and the San Francisco Housing Shock

Last year, 8 San Francisco homes sold for at least a million dollars over asking. This year, that number is 144 — and the two companies most responsible, OpenAI and Anthropic, haven’t even gone public yet.

In this episode, we follow the money into San Francisco’s housing market. Two AI labs headquartered in the city are racing toward trillion-dollar IPOs. Their employees are already turning paper wealth into cash — and bidding up a razor-thin supply of homes. We trace how the wealth arrives before the bell, what the Facebook 2012 listing tells us about what’s coming, and why the biggest surge may not land until 2027, when the lock-ups expire.

We also weigh the skeptic’s case, look north to Seattle for a very different tech story, and sit with the human cost — the six-figure earners being quietly priced out of the city.