Elon Musk says today's artificial-intelligence gold rush has inflated startup prices to “eye-watering” heights, creating “a herd of unicorns” whose valuations often eclipse their track records.
"The minimum impulse bid for an AI startup is like $1 billion … There are so many frickin-unicorns," the billionaire told Y Combinator's AI Startup School, adding that companies "less than a year old" routinely fetch multibillion-dollar tags.
Musk contrasted the frenzy with his own experience selling Zip2 for $300 million in 1999: "That was a lot at the time." Now, he said, venture investors throw ten-figure sums at fledgling firms on the mere promise of generative AI.
Market data backs him up. Research site Thunderbit counts more than 370 AI unicorns worth a combined $1 trillion, a 74 percent jump in one year. Crunchbase, on the other hand, shows early-stage startups reaching unicorn status at triple the pre-pandemic pace.
The boom has minted micro-teams with macro price tags, as chronicled in a recent Business Insider report, which profiled a dozen AI firms valued above $1 billion despite having fewer than 50 employees. Investors justify the premiums by pointing to breakout successes such as Amazon and Alphabet-backed Anthropic, now worth $61.5 billion after a year of product launches and Musk's own xAI, which is already valued at $80 billion, according to Reuters.
Why It Matters: Skeptics warn the stampede could end badly. IPO analysts at PitchBook say unicorn ranks keep swelling even as public-market debuts languish. Meanwhile, Foundation Capital research shows unicorn creation up 14-fold in a decade, fueled largely by cheap money and AI hype.
Musk’s comments arrive weeks after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted at the company's Code with Claude summit that a single-employee startup will reach a $1 billion valuation by 2026. His forecast excited founders who hope large-language-model agents can replace entire departments.
