The Insiders Cash Out. The Town Gets Nothing.

You will not read this in the prospectus. Traditional U.S. IPOs have already pulled in $137 billion in 2026 so far, on pace to crush the roughly $156 billion record set in 2021, with a second-half pipeline led by Anthropic’s potential $100 billion offering — a number so large it would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Companies that went public this year are trading up 21% on average from their IPO prices, per Dealogic. That is the report from the Wall Street Journal’s Corrie Driebusch, writing Monday, on the fall lineup of Oura, Inspire Brands (Dunkin’, Arby’s), Switch, SB Energy, Nscale, and the looming Anthropic deal, with Vantage Data Centers and OpenAI waiting in the wings for 2027. SpaceX’s $86 billion June offering went off smoothly. Capital is mobilized. The window is wide open. And not one of those dollars — not one — will flow to the franchisee who pours the coffee, the welder who laid the conduit in the Ohio data-center field, or the woman who assembled the fitness ring in Shenzhen. The 2026 IPO bonanza is, structurally, the same old bonanza: insiders cash out, the abstract equity-holder wins, the rooted worker and the host community inherit the costs.

The bull case is real, and I will state it plainly. The 2021 cohort, by the close of its first year, had two-thirds of its names trading below their offer prices, and the class as a whole still trades underwater on average. The 2026 cohort is its clean inversion — 21% above offer on average, with SpaceX’s historic deal absorbing without execution hiccup. Demand met supply without drama. The pipeline extends beyond the marquee names: Vantage, backed by Silver Lake and DigitalBridge, is already thinking about 2027; OpenAI is considering a 2026 listing, prepared to push to 2027 if conditions warrant, and just told investors its revenue grew 18% from Q1 to Q2 even as losses deepened, with growth re-accelerating after a July model launch. The optionality alone is a signal of confidence. Capital is finding pricing power. Supply is meeting demand. Investors are paying up for performance. This is what a functioning primary market is supposed to look like, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I owe the same honesty to the bear case. SpaceX has retreated below its IPO price and now trades near where it initially sold shares — a secondary-market retreat even after a smoothly-executed primary. Jersey Mike’s, which Blackstone took public in late July, has traded choppily. That chop is exactly why Inspire Brands may price below what some of its investors had hoped. The 2021 precedent is not ancient history; it is a five-year-old memory in which a class of companies went public into a mania and finished underwater, and the majority of those issues still have not recovered. If you read the secondary signal — the post-IPO trading — and not the primary headlines, the picture is more cautious. The market is functioning, but the market is also unforgiving, and the difference between 2021’s euphoria and 2026’s measured demand is the difference between an over-heated engine and a well-tuned one. I grant this. It is the strongest honest case against what I am about to say.

Now let me show you what the prospectus does not. Inspire Brands is owned by Roark Capital, a private-equity firm whose entire business is buying consumer brands, rolling them up, and selling the resulting entity — sometimes to another PE firm, sometimes to the public, sometimes to a strategic. Dunkin’ and Arby’s were bought, combined, levered up, and refinanced. The franchisees who actually operate the stores — who hire the teenagers, who keep the lights on at 5 a.m., who absorb every minimum-wage hike and every coffee-bean price spike — hold no equity in the company they built with their mornings. They will not participate in the IPO pop. They will read about it in the trade press. When the eventual secondary offering comes, or the next buyer arrives, or the debt refinancing squeezes operating margins, they will absorb that, too. That is what the PE rollup means in human terms: the abstraction of ownership away from the people who do the work.

Oura sells fitness-tracking rings popular among financial executives — and the financial executives buy them because the rings track sleep and recovery, the metrics of optimized labor. The ring is a small, elegant symbol of the same order: you, the user, generate the data; a private firm captures and capitalizes it; at IPO the founders and early investors cash out; you get the ring. The supply chain that assembles it is mostly invisible to the buyer, and entirely invisible to the investor who trades the ticker.

SB Energy, backed by SoftBank, is a data-center developer and power supplier; it just signed an Ohio agreement with OpenAI after weeks of negotiation. The Ohio community will host the substation, the water draw, the transmission upgrade, the noise, and the tax-base shift. The community will not own a share of the equity that benefits from those things. OpenAI itself is preparing to list — its losses deepened even as its revenue grew 18% quarter-over-quarter, a pattern that is fine if you believe the future will be brighter, and that is the bet being priced. The bet is being priced by people who can absorb the loss if the bet is wrong. The Ohio community cannot. That is the asymmetry the prospectus does not address.

And then there is the underlying mechanism — the financialization I used to work, on a Chicago trading desk, for years. I traded agricultural futures before they were planted. I watched the contracts clear. I never met a farmer in the pit, and I never thought about the field behind the contract, and that is exactly the point. The IPO market is the most refined expression of the same order: the further you are from the work and the place, the cleaner the profit. The closer you are, the more you absorb.

The cooperative tradition is not nostalgia. The Mondragon federation in the Basque Country employs over 70,000 people in worker-owned enterprises, governed by one-member-one-vote, with internal pay ratios near 5:1. Organic Valley, headquartered an hour from where I sit, is the largest organic farmer-owned cooperative in North America — 1,600 family farms, member-governed, no absentee shareholder to please. Land O’Lakes, the dairy cooperative, did $16.2 billion in sales last year. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered on Lake Street in my own town, is the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin, with over 31,000 member-owners across twelve counties. These are not small. They are not relics. They distribute ownership to the people who do the work and live in the places the work affects.

The alternative to public-market extraction is not no market. It is a market with widely-distributed ownership — employee stock-ownership plans that actually vest and actually vote, cooperatives that compound capital across generations, patient capital that answers to a community instead of to a quarterly return, community land trusts for the infrastructure that anchors a region. Property is real and good. It answers to the universal destination of goods — the earth was given for all. The rentier model answers to no one in particular, and that is what I am mourning.

The county I live in watched its railroad idled in stages over a generation — dieselization in 1958, the Twin Cities 400 gone in 1963, the Union Pacific takeover in 1995. The century-old paper mill in Wisconsin Rapids idled in 2020, around a thousand jobs. The family dairy farm consolidated into corporate irrigated potato ground, fewer names on the school rolls, fewer bodies in the church. The 1884 Catholic parish was shuttered and consolidated by the diocese. The VFW hall emptied as the veterans of the older wars died and the younger ones came home burned out and without the surplus to keep the place running.

The companies going public this fall will not save any of that. They may add a handful of jobs at a data-center site. They will extract many multiples of value for the people who already own them. That is what the window is. That is what the bonanza is. The town is not in it.

I have already lost most of this fight, and I tell you the truth partly because I can afford to. The 2026 IPO class will likely do well for its investors. The Dunkin’ franchisee will still be pouring coffee at 5 a.m. The Ohio community will still be hosting the substation. The Oura wearer will still be optimizing their sleep. The cooperative alternative will continue to do its work in the margins, one member at a time. The rentier order will continue to do its work in the center, one offering at a time. I would like to be wrong about this. I have not been wrong yet.