Here’s the thing about hot IPOs: they’re designed to make you feel like you’re missing out. A stock doubles before lunch, the financial media goes nuts, and suddenly you’re convinced everyone’s getting rich except you.
Spoiler alert: that’s exactly when you’re most likely to lose money.
Let me walk you through what actually happened with Figma, because it’s the blueprint for what’s about to happen with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic—companies worth trillions combined.
Figma makes design software. You’ve probably never heard of it, but your design team definitely has. Adobe tried buying them for $20 billion back in 2022, but regulators said no. So Figma went public on its own in July 2025.
Here’s where it gets interesting (and infuriating).
Figma priced at $33 and opened at $115. Everyone lost their minds. But buried in the fine print of the lockup agreement was a clause that almost nobody read. It said if the stock traded 25% above the IPO price for five consecutive days, insiders could start selling after just 36 days instead of the standard six months.
The stock opened 158% above that threshold. The trigger fired on Day 1.
By Day 36, people who actually understood the structure were selling at $80. The CEO had already filed predetermined sales schedules within days of the IPO. Eight months later, Figma was at $22—down 81% from the peak and 33% lower than the IPO price itself.
That wasn’t a failed IPO. That was the playbook working exactly as designed.
And now they’re running the same play again, except the numbers are bigger by an order of magnitude. Cerebras just went public at $185, opened at $350, and dropped 10% the next day. SpaceX is next. Anthropic after that. OpenAI is behind both.
Every single one of them is virtually guaranteed to use the same structural setup. These aren’t bad companies—some of them will probably be great. But the structure is designed to get early money out and leave late money holding the bag. That’s it.
So what do you actually do?
First: Don’t buy at the open. That opening pop is the gift to insiders. By the time you click ‘buy,’ the gift has already been delivered.
Second (and this is the one most investors miss): Buy the family, not the headline. Every AI IPO in the pipeline has publicly traded proxies you can buy today. SpaceX has Alphabet (which owns 6.11% of the company). Anthropic has Amazon and Nvidia. OpenAI has Microsoft. They all have supply chain plays—the picks and shovels these companies need to function.
These names are as easy to buy as a loaf of bread. No lockup risk. No allocation problem. No premium built on a float that was way too small.
Third: Watch the lockup calendar. Once a company goes public, the most important dates aren’t earnings dates—they’re lockup expirations. That’s when insider selling hits and the stock finally trades at something closer to what it’s actually worth.
The biggest AI IPO wave in history is weeks away. The institutions already know what’s coming. They’ve already lined up their allocations. They’ll be the sellers on Day 1.
Don’t be the sucker buying at the open.
