Wall Street just got a Discord invite.

Discord has confidentially filed for an IPO, according to reports, and is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as lead advisers.

Founded in 2015, Discord offers voice, video, and text chat tools, and now has more than 200 million monthly active users, making it one of the largest standalone social platforms not yet public.

A 2021 private round pegged the company’s valuation at roughly $15 billion, shortly after it passed on a $12 billion takeover bid from Microsoft.

The IPO watchlist

Discord’s move puts the spotlight back on long-awaited IPO candidates that could debut at massive valuations, as the capital demands of AI growth push companies toward public markets. Here are some of the biggest names investors are watching in 2026:

• ChatGPT maker OpenAI was valued at $500 billion in October and is reportedly targeting a $1 trillion valuation. The company is still operating at a loss, and with $1.4 trillion in long-term commitments, an IPO would give OpenAI access to public capital to fund its massive computing and infrastructure needs.
• Anthropic, the creator of Claude, is increasingly positioned as the alternative to OpenAI, with users favoring it for coding, research, and education. A November funding round reportedly valued the company as high as $350 billion, backed by Nvidia and Microsoft. “This is the enterprise safety hedge, with a much lower valuation than OpenAI and a narrative not about AGI magic but enterprise reliability and safety,” Nick Patience, AI coverage lead at The Futurum Group, told CNBC.
• SpaceX is shooting for the stars, and has floated ambitions that could include supporting data centers in orbit. Elon Musk has called reports of a 2026 IPO “accurate,” and if it happens, SpaceX could become the largest IPO ever. The company was valued near $800 billion in a December secondary share sale, with upside estimates reaching $1.5 trillion, a level supported by its lack of clear competition.

Not a flood, yet

While a handful of companies may hit the public markets this year, many startups are still choosing to stay private longer.

US venture-capital fundraising dropped 35% in 2025 as IPOs slowed, leaving investors with less cash to recycle into new funds. At the same time, many startups that raised big private rounds in earlier years don’t need to list right now, and with public markets demanding more disclosure and punishing weak profitability, they’re choosing to stay private for longer, keeping liquidity tight across the VC ecosystem.

That’s why potential IPOs from companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic matter: Successful listings could return cash to investors, reopen exit paths, and give venture firms room to raise new funds just as AI investment needs continue to surge.

In a market starved for exits, Discord’s move hints at what comes next.—SY

For private tech companies, the pressure is on to get out to the public markets ASAP. Companies like SpaceX, Stripe, and other big tech candidates are backed by venture capital funds that are designed to be patient, by warning investors that holding private positions for a decade or more is normal.

Despite that, fund investors do want to see cash hit their pockets at some point, and no one wants to miss the window to sell into the public markets—especially not with question marks around whether 2026 can sustain the stock price growth rates we saw last year.

Tune into today’s episode to learn why insiders are pushing for IPOs to happen early in today’s hot market, and which non-tech stocks are eyeing a public debut.—AB

🟢 What’s up

• Alphabet rose 2.5% to surpass Apple and become the second-largest US company by market cap for the first time since 2019.
• Strategy climbed 2.44% as MSCI backed away from a proposal to remove crypto-treasury firms from its indexes.
• GameStop gained 3.02% after unveiling a new CEO pay package for Ryan Cohen designed to incentivize “extraordinary growth.”
• Anti-cholesterol treatment maker Amgen rose 3.47%, extending its rally after acquiring Dark Blue Therapeutics.
• Eli Lilly rose 4.14% while Ventyx Biosciences jumped 36.62% on reports that Lilly is in talks to acquire Ventyx for about $1 billion.

What’s down

• Deckers Outdoor fell 4.12% after downgrades from Baird and Piper Sandler weighed on the Ugg and Hoka owner.
• First Solar dropped 10.29% following a Jefferies downgrade, citing weak booking visibility and uncertain strategic decisions.
• Western Digital fell 8.89% and Seagate Technology slid 6.71%, giving back some of the prior session’s double-digit gains.
• Cal-Maine Foods sank 1.61% on reports of a 52% drop in EPS and a 19% decline in sales, driven by falling egg prices.
• AST SpaceMobile fell 12.06% after analysts flagged tough competition from Elon Musk’s Starlink and the company’s lack of retail customers.
• Defense companies tumbled after President Trump posted on Truth Social that he will not permit them to issue dividends or buy back shares until they meet his demands. Lockheed Martin lost 4.82%, General Dynamics fell 4.18%, and Northrop Grumman sank 5.5%.

Although all eyeballs are glued on Venezuela’s crude oil reserves, the real stockpile to watch may be the country’s supposed secret stash of bitcoin.

President Nicolás Maduro’s arrest has rekindled the eyebrow-raising rumor that the Venezuelan government has socked away 600,000 bitcoin, about 3% of the world’s supply, worth roughly $60 billion.

As far as rumors go, it’s a good one because it makes sense: With sanctions barring Venezuela from global financial markets, crypto’s a clever end-run around restrictions. So far, however, no public blockchain data backs up this claim. Crypto experts say it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint how much bitcoin Venezuela holds—or where it’s being held—thanks to the decentralized assets’ privacy features. And besides, some say the government is just too darn corrupt to pool its resources in a collective pot.

Still, if these rumors turn out to be true, it could completely change the math of the crypto market. Two possibilities:

1. Venezuela could sell its bitcoin—in order to fund regime change or bridge the gap of crude oil disruption brought on by the US—which could flood the market and cause bitcoin prices to plummet.
2. The US could seize Venezuela’s bitcoin and funnel it into its own strategic reserve. The US, after all, boasts the world’s largest officially reported hoard of bitcoin at an estimated $18.91 billion, a treasure trove accumulated through seized criminal assets. Lock up Venezuela’s crypto as well, and bitcoin prices would likely soar.

These speculations alone have sent bitcoin on a rollercoaster this week, though the crypto king closed down today by 1.64%. As for what’s next, that depends on whether this rumor holds water or springs a leak.—JD

It may be the height of cuffing season, but JPMorgan is dumping proxy advisors.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the legacy firm’s asset management unit is fully abandoning the controversial practice of using third-party firms to collect data and give voting recommendations on proposals like mergers, executive compensation, and ESG-related issues.

Instead, it’s replacing independent research firms with—you guessed it—an in-house AI platform dubbed Proxy IQ, which JPMorgan says will analyze proxy data from 3,000 company meetings and provide recommendations to portfolio managers.

The Wall Street giant, which boasts roughly $7 trillion in client assets, will be the first major investment firm to ditch the proxy advisor system, according to the WSJ.

The beginning of the end

Third-party proxy advisory companies like Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis analyze corporate governance data, recommend how shareholders should vote, and even provide asset managers with voting infrastructure.

This system was developed in response to the growing complexity of how modern capital markets work. Over the past few decades, primary ownership of public firms shifted from individuals to institutions like mutual funds, pensions, and index funds. This all came at the same time that corporate ballots became increasingly technical and confusing. That made voting every proxy on a shareholder proposal a logistical nightmare—hence the rise of proxy advisory firms in the 1980s that simplified the process.

Outsourcing voting power has always been a double-edged sword. Critics have long argued that the proxy advisor system gives a few firms too much power to effectively make major decisions for companies they don’t technically own themselves.

But over the past year, conservatives and the Trump administration have made proxy advisors a top target, blaming them for the rise of ESG. In December, President Trump signed an executive order calling for antitrust regulators to investigate proxy advisors, and claimed they “regularly use their substantial power to advance and prioritize radical politically-motivated agendas.”

Influential CEOs have turned up the heat, as well. Elon Musk, for example, called proxy advisors “corporate terrorists” after Institutional Shareholder Services recommended Tesla shareholders reject his $1 trillion pay package. And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon himself has raged against proxy advisors, saying last spring at an event that they should be “gone and dead.”

Today, he took the first step toward making that a real possibility.—LB

• JPMorgan is taking over Apple’s credit card from Goldman Sachs.
• President Trump says he’s planning to ban large investors from buying homes.
• Polymarket is partnering with Dow Jones to provide data to the news organization.
• We’ve seen this film before: Warner Bros. Discovery once again rejected Paramount’s latest offer in favor of Netflix’s deal.
• Gold and silver miners raised the most cash in a decade last year through share sales.
• Joby Aviation just bought a 700,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Ohio as it seeks FAA approval for its electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts (eVTOLs).
• D-Wave Quantum is buying Quantum Circuits for $550 million, in the firm’s latest move to debut superconducting gate-model quantum systems this year.
• US mortgage rates dropped to 6.25%, the lowest since September 2024.

A week of labor market data continues with the usual initial jobless claims report tomorrow. We’ll also dabble in some macroeconomic news with reports on the US trade deficit in October, consumer credit in November, and Q3 productivity and labor costs.

On the earnings front, we’ll hear from RPM International, Acuity Brands, Tilray Brands, and The WD-40 Company.