I don’t think all three will actually IPO, if any. But they do need to claim they are working on it to maintain plausible deniability. Why IPO when you can just keep raking in cash from gullible VCs without publicly flaunting your damning financial information? Not to mention wearing your crashing share prices like a cone of shame.

A lot of it is certainly imaginary cash, but there’s a lot of actual cash sitting in many of the bank accounts of the pre-IPO companies. Those companies are functionally running shadow markets at their discretion, with some light touch regulatory checks or possibly no checks.