M&A Morgue

Mercor, a company whose primary business activity remains as opaque as venture capital's commitment to due diligence, is in talks to reach a $20 billion valuation. This would represent a doubling of its valuation from October, when the company was valued at a mere $10 billion—itself a number that presumably arrived at via dartboard rather than financial modeling. The talks represent a vertical ascent that would make a SpaceX rocket blush, accomplished in roughly six months with all the gravitational logic of a cartoon character running off a cliff before looking down.

Here is what we know about Mercor's actual business: almost nothing. The company's revenue, profitability, customer base, and fundamental operating metrics have been treated with the same transparency you'd expect from a Swiss bank account belonging to a crypto billionaire. Yet somehow, between October and now, the market has collectively decided the company is worth twice as much—a decision presumably made during a particularly bullish lunch meeting where someone's nose was very close to a very expensive whiteboard. The absence of any context whatsoever about what Mercor actually does has not, apparently, slowed the valuation express.

This is not Mercor's first rodeo in the arena of unexplained wealth creation. The October valuation itself appeared with minimal fanfare and minimal justification, suggesting that the company has developed a repeatable business model: exist mysteriously, and watch investors bid against each other to own a piece of the mystery. The pattern is so clean it's almost admirable in its shamelessness—each funding round simply multiplies the last one by two, as if venture capital has collectively agreed that compound interest is a better metric than, say, actual revenue.

When pressed for comment, investors presumably used words like "platform potential,