Anthropic, OpenAI chase SpaceX wave as giant IPOs loom
SpaceX’s $135 IPO, valued near $1.75 trillion, reset the market as Anthropic and OpenAI rushed toward listings and investors chased the next AI windfall.
SpaceX’s $135-a-share debut gave Wall Street a new benchmark, pricing the biggest U.S. initial public offering on record at about $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk’s company at roughly $1.75 trillion to $1.77 trillion. The deal did more than crown a single winner: it jolted the next wave of late-stage startups that now want to ride the same market appetite.
Anthropic moved first, confidentially filing for a U.S. initial public offering on June 1, 2026. OpenAI followed on June 8, putting two of the most closely watched artificial intelligence companies into the public-market pipeline at nearly the same time. The sequencing matters. Anthropic has edged ahead in the race to public markets, while OpenAI has said it has not decided on timing and that some things are easier as a private company, suggesting Sam Altman’s firm is in no rush to surrender the flexibility of a private balance sheet.
For investors, the real story is not just which company lists first, but who gets paid along the way. A strong IPO window can unlock venture returns, reprice secondary shares held by early backers and employees, and reset valuations for the next generation of late-stage startups trying to justify multibillion-dollar rounds. The momentum is already spilling into adjacent bets, including startups pitching orbital data centers as a way to capitalize on the SpaceX halo and the broader enthusiasm around AI infrastructure.
SpaceX’s offering also gave other would-be issuers a live case study in how much demand the market can absorb. CNBC said companies preparing to go public are likely to study the listing as a blueprint for how investors might digest a mega-cap IPO. Reuters noted that SpaceX’s decision to publish a price before the offering was highly unusual by Wall Street standards, underscoring just how unconventional the deal was even by the standards of an already frothy market.
The larger test is whether this surge reflects durable business fundamentals or a new cycle of AI-driven speculation spreading beyond the headline firms. For now, the money is chasing scale, scarcity and the promise of platforms large enough to reshape the market itself.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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