The trucks are what I remember. Not the houses, not yet — the trucks.
This was 2012, Atherton, a Tuesday probably, and I was driving through on some errand that doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that the street had rearranged itself. Contractors’ pickups lined both shoulders, nose to tail, so many of them that the road narrowed to one lane and you had to slow down and thread through, the way you do in a construction zone that has forgotten to end.
White trucks, mostly. Ladders racked on top. A generator humming behind a hedge somewhere I couldn’t see.
Behind the trucks, the estates were coming apart and going back together bigger.
I remember thinking: something has happened here that I am only seeing the edge of.
What had happened was Facebook.
The company had gone public that May, and within months the money was finding its way, the way money does, into contractors’ trucks parked along an Atherton road.
I didn’t call it a wave at the time. I called it, in my head, weather — a system that had rolled in and would eventually roll back out, the way markets always eventually correct, the way things revert.
I was an investor. I’d seen booms before.
I believed in the mean.
I was wrong.
The prices didn’t stay at their old level. They didn’t return to the world I’d known. The numbers from 2012 became the new floor, and every year since has been built on top of that floor. Today those prices look almost quaint, a thing you’d want to explain to a younger person the way you’d explain what a dollar used to buy.
And now there’s a tweet sitting in my feed this morning, tossed off, half a joke:
Just wait to see what happens to the Bay Area housing market once OpenAI and Anthropic go public.
I read it twice.
What I felt wasn’t curiosity — the feeling I’d had in 2012, watching an unfamiliar weather system with a kind of professional interest.
It was closer to dread.
Because I’ve already seen the after-photo.
And I know how to run the comparison forward.
The Facebook IPO created a large cohort of newly liquid employees on the Peninsula. They were mostly mid-career, and their stock had vested over four years against a company whose value had grown enormously.
The frontier labs are different.
If OpenAI and Anthropic eventually go public anywhere near the valuations already being discussed in private markets, they could create another enormous concentration of newly liquid wealth — among employees, founders and early investors.
I don’t know how large that wave will actually be. Maybe I’m overstating it. Not every employee will buy a house. Some will already own one. Some will move away. Much of the wealth will remain on paper for years.
And housing doesn’t respond mechanically to stock-market wealth.
But I do know something about the place where this wealth is likely to arrive.
There isn’t much of it.
Land is the constraint.
And I’ve seen what happens when a concentrated burst of new wealth meets a place that can’t make more land.
I try to picture what “much bigger” would look like on the ground and I keep landing on the same unhelpful image:
More trucks.
Longer lines of them.
People get ready..