One must admire the linguistic creativity of Silicon Valley’s venture capital class. Having exhausted the mythological wonder of the “unicorn”—a startup valued at a mere billion dollars, a sum that nowadays barely covers the kombucha budget at a mid-tier SaaS provider—they have escalated their terminological warfare. We are now being threatened with the arrival of the “hectocorn.”

Yes, “hectocorn.” It sounds less like a financial miracle and more like a stubborn fungal infection or a particularly aggressive geometric shape that one might encounter in a fever dream. But in the parlance of the tech oligarchy, it refers to private companies valued at over $100 billion. According to reports circulating with breathless excitement in financial rags, 2026 is slated to be the year these leviathans finally deign to descend from their clouded peaks and float upon the public markets.

Among the names whispered in the hushed, sterile corridors of deal-making are OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Stripe. We are told to anticipate these Initial Public Offerings with the same reverence medieval peasants held for the visitation of a saint, though in this case, the saint is likely to demand your pension fund as a tithe.

It is difficult to overstate the sophisticated absurdity of this moment. We have moved past the era of valuing companies based on pedestrian metrics like “profit” or “sustainable revenue models.” Those are artifacts of a bygone civilization, like the steam engine or the concept of shame. Instead, we are entering the age of the Hectocorn, where valuation is a function of pure, unadulterated vibes and the collective hallucination of a market desperate for a new narrative.

Take OpenAI and Anthropic, the twin darlings of the generative AI craze. These entities are currently burning through capital with the ferocity of a tire fire in a gale, all to produce chatbots that can write mediocre poetry and confidently hallucinate legal precedents. Yet, the market is poised to value them at the GDP of a mid-sized Balkan nation. Why? Because they promise a future where human cognition is rendered obsolete. Apparently, the prospect of our own intellectual redundancy is so tantalizing that we are willing to pay $100 billion for the privilege of accelerating it.

Then we have SpaceX, Elon Musk’s escape plan disguised as a logistics company. There is a delicious, dark irony in valuing a company at $100 billion based on its ability to leave the planet. It is the ultimate short position on Earth. While the rest of us are grappling with the mundane realities of crumbling infrastructure and climate volatility, the smart money is betting on the rockets. The valuation implies that the most valuable asset in the modern economy is the capacity to exit it entirely.

And let us not forget Stripe. Of all the rumored hectocorns, this payments giant—technically dual-headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco—is perhaps the most tethered to reality, as it actually facilitates the movement of money. But even here, the scale is staggering. The desperate desire to float these companies suggests a frantic need for liquidity among the early investors. The venture capitalists have gorged themselves at the private buffet for a decade; now, they require the public markets to act as the digestive tract for their excess.

The timing, specifically the target of 2026, is also revealing. It suggests a belief that the current economic turbulence—the sticky inflation, the geopolitical fragmentation, the general sense of doom—will have stabilized enough by then to allow retail investors to be fleeced with maximum efficiency. It is a gamble on the short memory of the public. They are banking on the hope that by 2026, we will have forgotten the lessons of the SPAC bubble or the crypto winter, and will once again be ready to pour our savings into companies whose valuations are held aloft by nothing more than helium and hubris.

To the cynical observer, the rise of the hectocorn is not a sign of innovation, but of inflation—not just of currency, but of concepts. When a billion dollars is no longer cool, and you need a hundred billion to turn heads, you are not describing a healthy ecosystem. You are describing a bubble that has become so large it has formed its own gravitational field. These companies are not just businesses; they are monuments to the excess of an era that refuses to end.

So, prepare yourselves. The hectocorns are coming. They will be heralded as the saviors of the stock market, the engines of the new economy. But strip away the Greek prefixes and the shiny prospectuses, and you will find the same old story: a transfer of wealth from the many to the few, wrapped in the glossy packaging of technological inevitability.