🚨 THIS IS THE CLEAREST SIGN YET THAT THE AI BUBBLE IS OUT OF CONTROL.
People are now trading real houses for stock that has no price.
OpenAI and Anthropic have not gone public, and their shares cannot be freely traded as no market has priced them. But still, San Francisco sellers are accepting them as payment.
This is peak euphoria.
Nima Gabbay, a real estate investor and developer, listed his home for $2.995 million and said he would take OpenAI or Anthropic shares instead of cash.
One OpenAI employee bid more than $1 million over asking. Gabbay says the buyer appeared to be inflating the value of his own stock to get there.
Nobody knows what these shares are worth. So the buyer picked whatever number made his offer look bigger.
Vijay Chattha, a tech entrepreneur, offered a $500,000 discount on his $2.5 million home if the buyer paid in Anthropic stock. It still has not sold.
Storm Duncan, who runs a tech investment bank, built a LinkedIn page just for his $8 million property and messaged Anthropic employees asking to trade the house for shares.
The OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are expected to create over 16,000 millionaires in the Bay Area. Buyers are rushing to lock in homes before that money lands and prices go higher. Sellers know it, so they are refusing to sell cheap.
That is why the whole market has gone vertical.
• 144 homes sold for at least $1 million over asking this year, up from 8 in the first half of 2025
• Sales above $10 million doubled in six months
• A home listed at $7.9 million sold for $15 million
• Fewer than 600 homes are left on the market, about 40% below the ten year average
In 2007, people borrowed against home appraisals nobody questioned and spent that paper value as cash. When the appraisals turned out to be wrong, the debt stayed and the value did not.
This is the same trade running backwards. Instead of borrowing against inflated houses to buy assets, people are spending inflated private stock to buy houses.
$LAB $OPENAI $VELVET
People are now trading real houses for stock that has no price.
OpenAI and Anthropic have not gone public, and their shares cannot be freely traded as no market has priced them. But still, San Francisco sellers are accepting them as payment.
This is peak euphoria.
Nima Gabbay, a real estate investor and developer, listed his home for $2.995 million and said he would take OpenAI or Anthropic shares instead of cash.
One OpenAI employee bid more than $1 million over asking. Gabbay says the buyer appeared to be inflating the value of his own stock to get there.
Nobody knows what these shares are worth. So the buyer picked whatever number made his offer look bigger.
Vijay Chattha, a tech entrepreneur, offered a $500,000 discount on his $2.5 million home if the buyer paid in Anthropic stock. It still has not sold.
Storm Duncan, who runs a tech investment bank, built a LinkedIn page just for his $8 million property and messaged Anthropic employees asking to trade the house for shares.
The OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs are expected to create over 16,000 millionaires in the Bay Area. Buyers are rushing to lock in homes before that money lands and prices go higher. Sellers know it, so they are refusing to sell cheap.
That is why the whole market has gone vertical.
• 144 homes sold for at least $1 million over asking this year, up from 8 in the first half of 2025
• Sales above $10 million doubled in six months
• A home listed at $7.9 million sold for $15 million
• Fewer than 600 homes are left on the market, about 40% below the ten year average
In 2007, people borrowed against home appraisals nobody questioned and spent that paper value as cash. When the appraisals turned out to be wrong, the debt stayed and the value did not.
This is the same trade running backwards. Instead of borrowing against inflated houses to buy assets, people are spending inflated private stock to buy houses.
$LAB $OPENAI $VELVET