NEW YORK — The roadshow deck that Goldman Sachs bankers carried into investor meetings this month priced SpaceX at a fixed $135 a share, a figure that values the rocket and satellite company at $1.77 trillion. The listing, expected to price Thursday and begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, would be the largest initial public offering on record, roughly three times the size of Alibaba’s $25 billion debut in 2014.
The offering is the first of three that are reshaping the public market’s calendar. OpenAI has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the matter, at a valuation above $850 billion, with a listing possible as soon as the fourth quarter. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 a week earlier, after a $65 billion Series H round that valued the company at about $965 billion, just shy of a trillion. Together the three companies are worth more than $2.5 trillion, and their arrivals in a single window amount to the largest concentration of technology IPOs in market history.
The deals have assembled the biggest syndicates Wall Street has fielded in years. Goldman Sachs leads the SpaceX offering, joined by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, according to the company’s amended filing of June 3. Anthropic and OpenAI have not named their underwriters, and people close to the deals said those conversations are still fluid. On a combined base approaching $2.9 trillion, even a 1% fee structure would produce roughly $28 billion in underwriting revenue, a sum that has made turning down a mandate the subject of pointed internal debate at rival firms.
SpaceX’s structure carries complications of its own. The company merged with Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI ahead of the filing, and the offering includes super-voting Class B shares that leave Mr. Musk with more than 82% of the voting power. Up to 30% of the shares may go to retail investors, an unusually large allocation for a deal of this size, according to the prospectus. The roadshow opened June 4, and people who attended said the presentation leaned on Starlink, which produces most of the revenue and nearly all of the operating profit, rather than on the rocket business, which remains a heavy capital consumer.
The two AI labs waiting in line face different questions from investors. OpenAI’s filing disclosed about $25 billion in annualized revenue, or roughly $2 billion a month, alongside projected losses of about $14 billion for 2026 and a profitability horizon that stretches toward 2030, according to people familiar with the documents. The company lost about $1.22 for every dollar of revenue in the first quarter. Its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told the All-In podcast that growth is constrained by compute, not demand: “There’s just not enough tokens available.”
Anthropic is smaller but closer to balance, with a revenue run-rate near $47 billion and a first profitable quarter projected this year, people familiar with the matter said. Its June 1 filing followed the Series H led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia. Bankers have begun scheduling meetings between prospective investors and Anthropic executives, and a listing could come as soon as October, according to people familiar with the process.
Perplexity Chief Executive Aravind Srinivas called the SpaceX debut a “leading indicator” for the two AI companies, and investors appear to agree. Order books for the offering are full, according to people involved in the sale, even as analysts describe the valuations as stretched. “These numbers look extreme,” one technology fund manager said. The skepticism extends to the forecasts underneath them. When OpenAI’s backers circulated a $30 trillion total-addressable-market estimate, Fred Hickey, editor of The High-Tech Strategist, pointed out that annual U.S. gross domestic product is $32.5 trillion.
The concentration of listings carries risks for the market itself. Three megadeals in a month can crowd out smaller offerings, and a weak debut by SpaceX would complicate the timing of the two filings behind it. Anthropic’s roadshow is expected in the fourth quarter, with a debut late this year or early next; OpenAI has signaled it wants to price before the narrative hardens around its losses.
The capital needs behind the filings are as large as the valuations. OpenAI’s finance leadership has privately raised concerns about sustaining the pace of data-center spending, according to TechCrunch, with the company’s annual burn estimated near $27 billion. Anthropic has committed to up to five gigawatts of compute capacity through 2030 under its expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services, a buildout that will require financing regardless of when its IPO lands. SpaceX, for its part, is spending on Starship development and Starlink expansion. None of the three can fund its ambitions from operating cash flow alone, which is what makes the timing of the window matter: if the market closes, the alternatives — debt, private rounds at lower prices — are all worse.
The character of the moment has changed regardless. The AI economy has stopped being a venture story and become a market story. Quarterly earnings calls will soon put the industry’s most guarded numbers — compute costs, token economics, churn — under public scrutiny. Mr. Altman announced the OpenAI filing on CNBC, with the ease of a company comfortable in the spotlight. Whether investors return that comfort, beginning Friday, will set the tone for the two registrations waiting behind SpaceX in the queue.
