Scott Galloway Professor of marketing at NYU Stern and author of bestselling books including The Four and The Algebra of Wealth.

“The IPO market is rigged, folks. … They'll use AI and they'll do all sorts of demand scenarios to make sure it gets a 20 or 30% pop on its first trade. … So if you're fortunate enough to get in pre-IPO or on from Goldman or JP Morgan, you buy it and then I would just sell it on the first trade.”

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

Context

Kara asked whether Scott would buy into Anthropic's expected IPO. He explains that banks price big IPOs to pop so the company gets a branding moment and favored clients get shares, while ordinary buyers get in after the pop.

Listen to the episode → More from Scott Galloway → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) Around 32:39 into the episode

Scott Galloway

out on the first trade.

Kara Swisher

First trade.

Scott Galloway

Yeah, I would trade out on the first. People will get so excited about it. Goldman and JPMorgan, the IPO market is rigged, folks. And that is they'll use AI and they'll do all sorts of demand scenarios to make sure it gets a 20 or 30% pop on its first trade. And they give the insiders, its institutional clients that create fees for them and investment banking fees, they give them access and they say to the company, it's worth taking additional dilution for the 20 to 30% pop because you'll be on the front page of every newspaper saying that you got a 20 to 30 percent pop, which is a once-in-a-lifetime branding event. It's totally rigged. And the people in this audience get to buy it after that pop when it hits its natural pricing level. So if you're fortunate enough to get in pre-IPO or on from Goldman or JP Morgan, you buy it and then I would just sell it on the first trade. The

Kara Swisher

first trade. Wow. Well, that's a real, you know, wow, that's, you really love that company. Okay, a couple more things. OpenAI wants to rebrand AI data centers as compute campuses. Fucking hate these people. They're not. I mean, they're not even good at English. It's just like, oh, come on, in an…

Scott Galloway

Well, it depends. If it's a merger and you have an opportunity, Morgan Stanley acquired. Or Dean Witter kind of acquired Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley is the better brand. Then you absorb Morgan Stanley as the brand. Wells Fargo, Norwest, a boring mortgage company out of Minneapolis, acquired…

Kara Swisher

remember that. The CPA was beyond petroleum. So I have some knowledge here.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway)

“Theft is hands down the best way to grow an economy. … $6 billion on a $30 billion economy means they grew their economy this week by 20%. … They essentially, relative to their government, paid for all government expenses for a year with this hack.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway)

“When you make a name change, it doesn't work, whether it's ValueJet to Transair or like, oh, I'll definitely go to work for Altria, not Philip Morris. … Generally speaking, it's a negative forward-leaking indicator when you think the general perception of us is so negative that we're not going to change it.” — Scott Galloway, Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway)