Bay Area Dating and Home Buying Under AI IPO Expectations: Locked-Up Stock, All-Cash Purchases, and H-4 Wives

[[**AI company IPO expectations create paper millionaires, but stock lockups make the wealth impossible to cash out; San Francisco sees a boom in choosing partners by company name and using locked-up shares as collateral to buy homes outright, while H-4 wives' work permits may be revoked.**

**Key points**

**1. AI IPO expectations create locked-up wealth**

Anthropic has filed its prospectus, planning to list on Nasdaq, with a rumored valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion; OpenAI has also secretly applied for an IPO. Employee shares cannot be sold before listing, and most remain locked for 180 days after listing.

**2. Dating queues by AI company**

Female clients' partner criteria have narrowed from AI engineers to company names, with Anthropic and OpenAI in the first tier; at offline matchmaking events, AI men dominate—7 men paid $800, while 15 women attended free.

**3. Locked shares as collateral enable all-cash home purchases**

In San Francisco, one in every three deals in the first eight months was all-cash; among single-family homes above $6 million, three of four were all-cash; AI clients pledge unvested shares to borrow a quiet loan and pay in full, pushing the Bay Area's all-cash share of transactions to a 20-year high.

**4. H-4 "Silicon Valley trophy wives" work permits may be revoked**

This article is from the WeChat public account: Dongcha Beating, author: Sleepy, cover image from: Visual China

Last week, a Chinese woman living in San Francisco announced a new position on LinkedIn. The new job title was "Silicon Valley trophy wife."

These four characters have drifted around the Chinese internet for many years. In 2022, an article defined it: "I'm a trophy wife in Silicon Valley—by which I mean I'm unemployed in Silicon Valley, I'm a resentful woman in Silicon Valley."

Those who write such things are mostly wives who came to the Bay Area following their husbands' H-1B visas. They hold H-4 dependent visas; before 2015 they could not legally work a single day, and after 2015 only some of them obtained work permits. Many waited years for their husbands' green card priority dates, for a piece of paper that would let them work.

The whole city of San Francisco behind her is in fact also waiting.

Anthropic plans to list in November, with a target valuation circulating in the market close to $2 trillion. OpenAI also secretly filed for an IPO in June; it raised a large round in March at an $852 billion valuation and is said to be negotiating the next round at a $1.4 trillion valuation.

Employees of these two companies hold the city's most valuable thing that currently cannot be spent. It cannot be sold before listing, and after listing it is locked for another 180 days.

The money is still locked, but San Francisco can no longer wait. Some people look for marriage partners by company name; some pledge their unvested shares to borrow money and buy homes outright.

Cap Table

In 2010, Zhao Qinghua finished a PhD in electrical engineering at UC San Diego and stayed in the Bay Area. In those years she tried all the mainstream dating sites and never met a suitable Chinese person, so she and a friend simply built their own overseas Chinese matchmaking site and named it "Two Red Beans."

Fifteen years later, "Two Red Beans" hosts mixers and speed-dating dinners in Silicon Valley. Female clients' requirements have narrowed ring by ring, from Silicon Valley to engineers, and from engineers to AI engineers. Recently, company names have appeared directly in the requirements.

"The first tier is Anthropic and OpenAI," Zhao Qinghua said.

Fifteen years ago, the most prominent field on the site's profile page asked how many years you had been in America. Now, female clients first ask which company you work for.

Last October, OpenAI let employees sell some old shares. More than 600 current and former employees cashed out about $6.6 billion in total, with a cap of $30 million each; about 75 people sold the maximum. In August this year, OpenAI bought back about $7 billion of employee shares at an $852 billion valuation.

Anthropic's employees are more patient. In February this year, the company held an employee tender offer at a $350 billion valuation, and many people reportedly were reluctant to sell. At the end of May, Anthropic completed a $65 billion Series H at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. Those who were reluctant to sell saw the shares in their hands rise to nearly three times in just over three months.

Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das posted on X in May this year that among people who have worked at OpenAI, Anthropic or Nvidia, about 10,000 could retire right now. People earning less than $500,000 a year could work their whole lives and never reach that line.

Zhao Qinghua said these Silicon Valley men have very high IQs, though not necessarily high emotional intelligence; they were trained in technology and logic from childhood and want a warm partner who understands them. She added that once a man's net worth rises, "of course he'll want to find someone prettier."

Bay Area matchmaker Amy Yang previously did tax analysis at Oracle. She said people now fly to the Bay Area every week specifically to find a partner, hoping to meet engineers, preferably those doing AI. She has a client in Los Angeles who is considering moving to San Francisco for half a year to be closer to companies like OpenAI.

34-year-old Sue Zhong is her client. She came to the US from China at 16, worked in her family's marine fuel business, and moved from New York to Los Angeles last year. She tried several matchmaking agencies and paid Amy Yang $1,500 for three introductions.

She said there is a group of people in Silicon Valley who want to change the world, and she is very curious about AI founders—she can fly over from Los Angeles to meet them anytime. A man on a fixed salary has little left after taxes; she wants to find a CEO, or someone in an even higher income bracket. But she also said that a spiritual connection and chemistry matter far more than net worth.

There is also a businesswoman in her forties, divorced, still in China, with the son from her first marriage by her side, who is planning to move to Silicon Valley. "For me, marriage now is an asset restructuring."

The New York Post wrote about this group under the headline "The Gold Diggers Are Flocking to Silicon Valley."

Girlfriend PRD

The successful AI men in Amy Yang's hands are looking for someone with a bachelor's degree and a stable job of her own in the Bay Area.

21-year-old Kinjal Nandy looked for a girlfriend the way he does product. Two years ago he dropped out of Cornell and came to the Bay Area, co-founded an AI company with a friend, and works 84 hours a week. Following the format of a product requirements document, he wrote a PRD for his future girlfriend in the notes app on his phone, with requirements including high emotional intelligence and good boundaries.

Later he met someone on a membership-based app. That app gives you only about twenty right swipes a day. "We only met a few weeks ago," he said, "and so far it feels pretty good."

Once, over dinner in Hayes Valley, he and a friend talked about this experience and came up with an idea. His company began giving new employees free dating app memberships. As a result, each of the next few job openings it posted received more than 500 resumes.

On dating apps, AI is the strongest calling card. On Hinge, some people fill in the company field simply as "AI lab," and Bumble lists AI alongside skiing and yoga as interest tags. A "Date My Friend" event was held in the Mission, where a woman gave a several-slide presentation on stage to find a match for her friend, with most of the slides devoted to what the friend does at an AI company.

Hyperspell CEO Conor Brennan-Burke uses AI to screen people. He is 33 this year and once said he would "stay single until the B round"; he is still single now. He won't date anyone who hates AI or hates capitalism. The person he wants must be willing to join him in biohacking for longevity and ultimately join him in connecting his brain to AI.

He even ranks companies. People from OpenAI are dateable; people from Anthropic need to be weighed carefully—that company was close to doomers in its early years, and he thinks living with a Doomer would be a bit of a struggle.

On the same list, 24-year-old second-grade teacher Jessica Traver sees things exactly the opposite way. An OpenAI badge is more or less a red flag in her eyes, while Anthropic has some moral sense—Dario Amodei has publicly called for AI to slow down.

Madison Hsieh, 25, an AI product manager at Amazon Cloud, had an ex who worshipped Elon Musk and later became more and more extreme, while also dating several other women behind her back. Since then, all AI founders have gone on her blacklist. Her current boyfriend also works at an AI startup, and she has only one bottom line: he cannot go out and start his own company.

Alli Goldberg brought this pickiness to the stage. She toured seven cities with the show "Love Isn't Blind," scrolling through male guests' phones in public on stage, going through ChatGPT chat histories and Reddit posts one by one. On that night at The Foundry in San Francisco's SoMa, two of the four male guests worked in AI, and the audience booed one of them.

Honey Pot

Amy Andersen worked early in her career as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. Once she was on a date with a VC at Harry's Bar in San Francisco, and the man spent the whole evening scanning the other people in the bar, looking for a BBD (bigger, better deal). She said that night scared her badly.

In 2003, she opened the matchmaking agency Linx Dating in Menlo Park. The next year Google went public, and Silicon Valley gained thousands of millionaires overnight.

Linx Dating founder Amy Andersen

Image source: Linx Dating

By 2013, she was already being called "Silicon Valley's Cupid," with a basic package at $2,500, a VIP package starting at $50,000, and 19,000 people in her database.

Twelve years later, her starting price is $150,000. She turns down about 98% of business and takes on fewer than ten clients at a time. She has booked clients private jets to Paris and chartered nighttime yacht dinners on the Seine.

She says there is nothing wrong with dating for money, but rich people can spot insincerity at a glance. About a third of her wealthy clients are women. "Many of my clients built these AIs themselves, built all kinds of dating apps, and in the end they still chose me."

Domo Vang, 29, belongs to a younger generation. Most of her clients are male employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Google, and many of them found her through her Instagram videos. The product she sells is a $1,000 "dating diagnosis": the first half hour simulates a date with you, and the rest of the time she tells you what went wrong and which sentence you should never say again.

Two 22-year-old Stanford dropouts simply turned matchmaking into AI. Their app is called Known: users first have a voice chat with the AI, which recommends only one person at a time and charges $15 for each date it arranges. Last July, Known held a launch party at the nightclub Great Northern, and later put up an ad in the Bay Area that read, "You may die alone."

Then came October 9, when a Saudi engineer who had worked at OpenAI was arrested by the FBI for installing recording equipment in the San Francisco office. OpenAI subsequently gave its employees a counterespionage class.

The class covered honey pots—using sex and romance to get close to a target—citing an old case in which someone was sent to seduce an American diplomat in Russia, and also recounting a real incident at a San Francisco playground where a stranger sidled up to an OpenAI employee and asked about work matters. The company warned employees not to wear clothing bearing the company logo once they leave the office.

Mark Trott, who spent more than a decade in counterespionage at the FBI's San Francisco field office, says the density of espionage activity in San Francisco is, if not greater than Washington's, at least on par with it. A local newspaper even wrote a warning for single readers: a date who is more interested in your job than in you may be a spy.

Quiet Loan

During the days the FBI was making arrests, San Francisco was celebrating Fleet Week, with the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron soaring between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. In Cow Hollow, an apartment with a 900-square-foot terrace and a head-on view of the Blue Angels had just sold a few weeks earlier. It was listed at $4 million; of nine offers, half were all-cash, and it closed at $6.7 million.

In the first eight months of this year, one out of every three homes sold in San Francisco was an all-cash purchase, and three out of four of those were single-family homes priced above $6 million. The share of all-cash deals in the Bay Area has reached its highest point in twenty years. In March, the median price of a single-family home in San Francisco rose to $2.15 million, a record.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's brother Alexander Lurie sells luxury homes in the city. He says many AI clients' shares are still in their lockup period and cannot be sold, so they pledge them and take out a quiet loan, using the borrowed money to pay in cash. Many of these people cannot earn seven figures from salary alone, and carrying a loan on a $10 million house, they still have to pay the mortgage every month.

In Duboce Triangle, right next to "Cerebral Valley," an Edwardian-era house that had been renovated for two years was listed in June at just under $3 million. The attic staircase is electric, and the marble kitchen island seats six. The seller let it be known that payment could be made in OpenAI or Anthropic stock.

On open-house day, one visitor told the agent, Kristal Pollack, that she really wished it were six months from now.

In August, a house in Pacific Heights listed at around $4 million received 16 offers and ultimately sold for $6.63 million to a couple, one of whom is the founder of an AI recruiting firm. In early October, an AI researcher bought a Victorian-era house on the same block for about $8 million.

Alexander Lurie says the city is suffering from a "mansion deficit." About 50 buyers are looking for homes in the $20 million range, fewer than ten such homes come on the market each year, and about 70% of the deals he handles are never publicly listed.

Prices are even higher by the lake. In March of this year, a lakefront mansion at Lake Tahoe sold privately for $125 million to a company connected to SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson, double the previous local record. In January, Sergey Brin bought a lakefront estate in Nevada—a state with no personal income tax—for $42 million.

On June 12, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq, raising about $85.7 billion including the over-allotment, the largest IPO in history.

By mid-June of this year, business jet takeoffs and landings in San Francisco were up about 11% from the same period last year, the fastest growth among major U.S. cities. In Brownsville, the small Texas city next to SpaceX's launch site, 97 business jets came and went during the IPO days, nearly three times the usual number.

A California aircraft broker says that ten years ago, one in five people who came to him to buy a plane worked in tech; now it is three out of four. Planes he sold last year can now be resold for 10% to 15% more.

Amanda Applegate, a lawyer in Cleveland, specializes in drafting contracts for people buying aircraft. Her firm's business is up 25% this year, and she has been so busy that she canceled her annual vacation. She says this wave was set off by several big cash-outs in the tech industry.

Ted Egan, San Francisco's chief economist, has looked at the city's economic data for twenty years and seen several boom cycles, and he says none has ever reached this level. But over the past three years, San Francisco has lost about 40,000 jobs, most of them in tech. He says AI is growing wildly while the older generation of tech companies is contracting.

Caviar

At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, Jason Calacanis threw a party for 3,000 people in New York, budgeting $12,000 for caviar alone.

Twenty-six years later, Nikita Khandheria, a 24-year-old event planner who organizes events for OpenAI and Anthropic, says she hasn't heard anyone mention caviar in a long time, and nobody cares.

And this crowd of guests isn't much for drinking. Khandheria's AI clients spend about 80% of their budget on experiences, with food and drink accounting for only 20%. The most expensive event she has taken on had a budget of $2.2 million. In July, she held a fire-breathing class for eight AI executives at a 4,000-square-foot venue in the Marina District, with performers brought in from Europe. Everyone got so into it that the venue's ceiling had to be repainted afterward.

Event planner Nikita Khandheria in San Francisco's Marina neighborhood

Taking part in on-site setup before a party

Image source: The San Francisco Standard

Speaking of the strange things clients like to do, she said, "I have a very, very strong legal team."

Vivienne Errington-Barnes, CEO of the events company Shift+Alt, says clients have a frantic craving for human connection. AI companies also hold these events to dispel outside fears about them, to let people see face to face that the people building AI are flesh-and-blood humans too.

On May 18, 2012, Facebook went public. The next day, Mark Zuckerberg hosted fewer than a hundred guests in his own backyard in Palo Alto; the guests only learned upon arriving that it was a wedding, and on the tables was Mexican food and sushi delivered from two neighborhood restaurants.

Fourteen years later, the next item on Nikita Khandheria's schedule is a tech executive's wedding vow renewal.

She is going to install an indoor skydiving machine at the venue, the kind that uses wind to blow people into midair. "This thing is anchored to the ceiling up top and to the floor down below."

The vows are to be spoken in midair, and she says the hardest part is the microphone: "Once a person is weightless, the microphone is hard to control."

Two in the morning

Alessandra Ram has two babies at home: one is a ten-month-old daughter, and the other is a large language model. Both wake people up at two in the morning.

Her husband heads AI at a company. In May, she published a piece in Wired titled "Meet the AI Sad Wives," with a subtitle apologizing to readers: "If the man you married is obsessed with AI, I am really, really sorry."

She wrote that if her husband talked about Claude Code for one more minute, she felt she would actually die.

Most of the people she interviewed were white-collar couples in the Bay Area. The most common division of labor is that he does AI and she does everything else. In a worse version, he is desperately trying to claw his way into the AI world, feeling he has no choice but to get in, while she just wishes he would do something else, anything at all.

Several family therapists she asked all said there are more and more such households. Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, a labor economist at Rutgers University, calls these husbands "ideal workers," people who give themselves entirely to this wave, afraid of missing something if they stop for five minutes, like the men who left their families and headed west during the gold rush.

After the article came out, quite a few men on X were unhappy, and someone wrote a piece titled "Meet the AI Sad Husbands" in response.

But the story didn't end there. On July 21, another post spread on social platforms, saying that a husband in San Francisco had pushed almost all child-rearing onto his wife so that he could become "AI native," and it got more than 100,000 views within hours. A joke was also going around on TikTok: a woman works desperately at a laptop while the man beside her runs an AI company that loses $30,000 a month.

The sad wives actually have something solid in their hands. California is a community property state, and by default half of the stock options and RSUs the husband receives after marriage belong to her. If the options were granted before marriage and vest gradually after marriage, the courts have a ready-made formula that looks at what proportion of the years were worked during the marriage and divides accordingly.

Washington State has the same system. In 2019, when MacKenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos divorced, she walked away with about 4% of Amazon shares, worth more than $30 billion at the time, making her one of the richest women in the world.

So the wealthy party will sign a prenup first. Bay Area family lawyers advertise prenups whose clauses mention RSUs, ISOs, vesting and carried interest, and they read like an offer letter. Amy Andersen wrote seven rules for people who want to date the super-rich, and the last one is also to sign a prenup.

There are also wives whose immediate worry is still whether they can go to work.

Wives who came to the Bay Area on their husbands' H-1B visas had to wait until 2015 for a new rule that allowed some H-4 dependents to apply for work permits. Of those who obtained permits in the first few years, 94% were women. In early September of this year, a proposal appeared on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's regulatory agenda to rescind that rule. It has not yet reached the formal proposed-rule stage, and permits already issued remain valid for now.

In the same autumn, someone on LinkedIn listed "Silicon Valley trophy wife" as a new job. Others may have to go back to the pre-2015 days of waiting at home for a piece of paper that approves them to go to work.

Leverage

On Monday, October 26, the document the whole city had been waiting for was made public.

Anthropic publicly filed a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, preparing to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading. How many shares will be issued and at what price are not yet stated. It is said the listing could come as early as mid-November, with a market valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.

According to the prospectus, Anthropic had revenue of $4.6 billion last year and a net loss of $42 billion. In the first half of this year, revenue was $16.3 billion and the net loss was $80.7 billion, of which about $72.4 billion came from fair value changes in financial instruments such as convertible bonds.

The business itself turned around in the second quarter. First-quarter revenue was $4.7 billion with an operating loss of $1.7 billion. Second-quarter revenue was $11.6 billion with an operating profit of $974 million.

The seven co-founders reiterated in the prospectus their pledge to donate 80% of their personal wealth. At the most recent round's price, that 80% is worth about $79.4 billion. The prospectus also states that this pledge is voluntary and can be withdrawn.

As of the end of September, Anthropic had about 5,300 employees in total. These are the people in what Zhao Qinghua calls the first tier.

The six-month unlock period the whole city has been anticipating also has a more detailed arrangement. Under the currently disclosed plan, some employees and early shareholders can sell shares from the first day of listing, with further batches released on the 27th, 48th, 62nd and 76th days. The entire lockup is split into more than twenty windows spread over about a year, and most shares will still be locked for 180 days.

Four days before the prospectus was made public, on Thursday, October 22, the market had just been through an AI selloff.

The previous day after the close, Meta reported third-quarter results. Capital expenditure for the quarter was $34.9 billion, exceeding the $32.8 billion in cash generated by operations, turning free cash flow negative at $2.1 billion. It also raised the lower bound of this year's capital expenditure to $135 billion and proposed issuing a new class of non-voting shares. On Thursday, Meta's stock fell 7% and the Nasdaq fell 2.6%, its worst day since early June.

Also in these days, OpenAI lowered the valuation of its new funding round from $1.4 trillion to $1.25 trillion, with some investors balking at the original price.

On the evening of October 22, Domo Vang hosted a matchmaking dinner at Harborview, a Cantonese restaurant on the Embarcadero.

The restaurant is listed in the Michelin Guide, its menu includes Beijing duck, and from the terrace you can see the clock tower of the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge. Everyone who came had submitted an application in advance. Among the men were Anthropic employees, the oldest in his seventies. The women ranged from their early twenties to around thirty-five.

On dating apps there are always more men than women, and it is mostly women who do the choosing. But offline in San Francisco, seven men each paid $800 and fifteen women entered free, and it was the men who did the choosing.

Domo Vang said that dating in San Francisco right now is dominated by men working in AI. "Honestly, they have a lot of leverage."

References

[1] OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut, CNBC

[2] S.F.'s hottest singles are AI engineers, San Francisco Chronicle

[3] Gold-digging gals are flocking to Silicon Valley to land rich husbands in AI, New York Post

[4] Dating site 2RedBeans focuses on Chinese singles abroad, VentureBeat

[5] Silicon Valley looks to Amy Andersen for love, at $50,000 a pop, Fortune

[6] $150k to find love? Inside the high-stakes Silicon Valley matchmaking scene, The San Francisco Standard

[7] Cupid of Silicon Valley: I've helped thousands of millionaires find love, here are my 7 rules for dating an ultra-wealthy person, CNBC Make It

[8] Silicon Valley tech workers flush with AI wealth are paying up to $500,000 for luxury matchmakers, Moneywise

[9] AI wants to be your wingman, Axios

[11] AI boom catapults San Francisco median home price above $2 million, Los Angeles Times

[13] Make Way For the New Real Housewives of Silicon Valley, The Daily Beast Channel: International Hotspots. This content is published with the author's authorization; the views represent only the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. If you have objections or complaints about this article, please contact tougao@huxiu.com. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP [ ]