Coming This Summer: The Mother(s) of all IPOs
The upcoming Mega-IPO AI stock market offerings
Generally I try to ignore IPOs because:
I don’t buy individual stocks, and you shouldn’t either.
When the highly informed insiders are selling to less-informed outsiders (precisely the definition of an IPO) we should be extra cautious.
Specifically, if the business’ opportunity in the future is so good, shouldn’t the insiders retain the most ownership, rather than give it up forever?
There’s a certain amount of media and investment banking roadshow hype that accompanies an IPO, which can overwhelm rational analysis and substitute for narrative. The “growth” version of investing typically dominates the “fundamentals” version of investing in an IPO situation.
This is all well-known Warren Buffett-type wisdom about why IPOs shouldn’t be the focus of any retail investor’s approach.
On the other hand…the MOTHER OF ALL IPO SUMMERS is rapidly approaching so it feels important to at least mark the occasion.
The 3 big IPOs incoming, as you probably already know, are SpaceX (rockets), OpenAI (AI) and Anthropic (AI).
The Venn Diagram1 connecting these IPOs is of course not only the preconditions for Skynet absolutely establishing intelligent robot-drone control over an enslaved human race, but also Elon Musk.2
From a business-news perspective, the thing we are all mostly going to pay attention to (instead of imminent human enslavement to space robots with the intentional cooperation of our billionaire overlords) is the extraordinary sums of money involved. Just unprecedented gobs of exponential wealth, sloshing around between founders and investors. It’s just - we’ve never, ever, seen a series of public company launches like this. Not at this scale. It’s certainly the start (But also gulp! maybe the end) of something big.
The most probable effect of these IPOs for the general US stock investor is that they will passively end up owning all three of them when they get included in the US large cap indices. These three companies seem ultimately destined for the S&P500 in particular, which includes companies currently above a $22 billion valuation, which all three of these most definitely will be.
Typically Standard & Poors waits a year following an IPO before inclusion in their index, although plenty of business news indicates that these three companies would be fast-tracked (maybe to 6 months?) into this key index because of their unusual size, and presumably because of investor interest as well. S&P also typically waited for a year of GAAP profitability and a 50%+ public float of shares, but those rules might also be subject to exceptions for these mega-IPOs.
The “when will it be included in the index?” question and anticipation around Tesla was a major driver of investor interest before the EV car company was finally included in December 2020. Tesla had a profitability problem for a very long time. Once included, however, Tesla3 has hovered around the 7th or 8th largest company by market capitalization, a member of the Magnificent Seven drivers of mega-cap growth in the index over the past 5 years.
Assuming somewhat rapid inclusion in the large cap indices, these new mega cap companies SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are unlikely to do much to improve the fundamental flaw of the S&P500 index in recent years: Namely, that retail investors are unwittingly over-exposed to a tiny number of companies (7-10) in a relatively narrow segment of global capitalism. We think we own a diversified list of 500 big US companies, but we actually own mostly 7-10 Silicon Valley companies, and then a tiny slice of another 490 diversified companies.
Anyway all indications are that these IPOs will continue that trend. Which is maybe fine. I don’t know.
Some have argued that the sheer size of the IPOs could plausibly stress available capital for other public companies, destabilizing public markets in the second half of the year, although I am skeptical of that worry. It feels like there’s always capital available from somewhere.4
Let us count the ways in which these IPOs are potentially transformative, and what are a few things we should we know about them?
SpaceX
The first one likely to pop is SpaceX, with the anticipated ticker SPCX on Nasdaq.
SpaceX seeks to raise $75-$80 billion in investor capital from the IPO, and targets a $1.8 trillion valuation. That would make it the seventh largest public company in the United States, bigger than Tesla, which currently holds that ranking.
It would also make it the largest IPO in terms of new capital raised, dwarfing the previous record-holder of state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in 2019 by 3 times as much capital.
Size is not everything, of course. But it is something.
Profit
Is SpaceX profitable? No, they have a loss from operations of $1.9 billion last quarter, and $2.59 billion for all of 2025. It’s a badge of honor for high tech companies to be loss-making at the time of their IPOs (hot IPOs like Amazon, Uber, and Facebook all lost lots of money before and after their IPOs.)
SpaceX’s business partly consists of a massive satellite network (more than 9,000 satellites and growing!) known as Starlink, which is profitable and experiencing high growth.
It is also involved in launching massive rockets with payloads into space. The most recent branded generation is known as Starship, with ambitions for Moon-lander and Mars-lander missions. This business loses money, although it generated $4 billion in revenue last year, so it’s probably loss-making because it is investing in next-generation technology. More and bigger rockets cost lots of money up front to get it right.
SpaceX also has an AI segment known as SpaceXAI - of course it does, that’s Elon Musk for you - which lost $6.3 billion last year. The biggest losses in the company overall are attributed to giant investments in the AI side of SpaceX. I honestly don’t know what AI does for SpaceX except create Skynet? I assume that’s Musk’s ultimate plan.
What do we know about wealth-effects?
Musk may own 43% of SpaceX, so we can imagine 43% of a 1.8 trillion SpaceX valuation would add $774 billion to his net worth. On Manifold Markets the current odds of “Will Elon Musk become a trillionaire before July 2026” are at 75% as of this writing. That jumped from around a 20% probability after Friday May 15th.
OpenAI
This is the parent company of ChatGPT. They are expected to file for an IPO in days or weeks from now, with a target offering in the second-half of 2026.
It’s Sam Altman led. It started as a non-profit. People who seem to know about the governance of OpenAI believe that Altman has a pathological lying problem.5 Elon Musk was involved early, then subsequently developed a burning hatred for Altman (it’s mutual!) and recently sued and lost a court case against OpenAI, based on the expiry of the statute of limitations, a timing issue.
The substance of Musk’s case seemed to be that he and others were harmed by the shift from a non-profit to a for-profit model. The jury and judge ruled that Musk knew for years about the shift to a for-profit model and he was too late to complain now, through this lawsuit.
The end of the Musk case6 seems to have opened up the window for an IPO of OpenAI.
The size of the OpenAI IPO
Although as of this writing OpenAI has not officially filed for its IPO yet, it is expected to do so very soon. News reports from last year put a potential market capitalization valuation at $1 trillion. A private market investment in April 2026 valued the company at $852 billion and presumably a public launch would target something above that. Until very recently $1 trillion was considered an unreachable scale for business operations. But in 2026 that $1 trillion valuation would put it squarely in the size bracket between Berkshire Hathaway and Walmart, or the tenth largest public company in the United States. Which is nuts. Because those are great American companies of extraordinary breadth and scale and OpenAI is a startup created fifteen minutes ago (technically, 2015) that was a non-profit until 2 minutes ago (technically, 2025).
Although the company claims plans to spend $1.4 trillion on physical infrastructure, it did raise $122 billion from private investors this year, so it’s not likely filing for an IPO because capital for growth is scarce.
OpenAI is not expected to be profitable until 2030, which again is not a huge barrier for very buzzy Silicon Valley companies.
Anthropic - The company behind AI tool Claude.
The origin of Anthropic seems to be that they were going to be the “good guys” as compared to the OpenAI guys. It was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, and they continue to hire people from there.7
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