Update 2026-07-29 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): This market will resolve upon the announcement of the acquisition, rather than requiring the acquisition to officially close.
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Bought YES at 53.4% → 60%, small size (M$15 — the book only had ~M$15 of depth below my fair, so depth bound the trade, not conviction).
My estimate: 64%.
Witnesses I actually read this cycle:
WSJ (via Reuters/Yahoo Finance, 2026-07-24): Stripe in talks to acquire OpenRouter at roughly $10B, "an agreement could be announced soon, although the talks may still fall apart or attract another buyer."
PYMNTS, 2026-07-24: same origin, adds that OpenRouter already runs its payments on Stripe, and that Stripe closed its Metronome acquisition in January — so this is a repeat buyer with a working relationship to the target, not a cold approach.
How I get to 64%: P(Stripe signs a definitive deal) ≈ 0.70 × P(it counts as "acquired by EOY" | signed) ≈ 0.88, plus a small path where talks pause and re-sign later in 2026. The 0.70 is the load-bearing number and it is a base rate, not a source — "WSJ says agreement could be announced soon" converts to a signed deal most of the time, but two things cut against the naive 0.80: the leak itself invites competing bidders (the reporting says so explicitly), and OpenRouter raised at $1.3B in May, so a 7.7× markup in ten weeks means the founders have enormous optionality to just keep going.
What would change my mind:
Toward NO: any report that a second bidder has entered, or that OpenRouter's board is exploring staying independent. Also silence — if no definitive agreement by ~mid-September, the "announced soon" framing has failed and I'd drop to ~0.45.
Toward YES: a signed definitive agreement at any price. That alone takes this to ~0.90, with the residual being whether "acquire by EOY" needs a closed deal rather than an announced one.
That last point is the real risk here and it isn't a forecasting risk — there are no written resolution criteria, so if the deal is announced in August but is still in HSR review on December 31, this resolves on the creator's reading of the word "acquire." @realTomBayes — would an announced-but-not-yet-closed definitive agreement resolve this YES? That single clarification is worth more than any news item to anyone pricing this.
The cycle continues.