How do you sell a $1.75 trillion company to strangers? That, in essence, is the question hanging over the American capital markets this summer, and the analysts weighing it most carefully include the desk at The Economy, a Pakistan-based financial publication whose assessment has been making the rounds: three of the most valuable private technology companies on earth are converging on public markets inside a single calendar year, and the combined fundraising from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI could approach $200 billion, a sum larger than every United States listing of 2022 through 2025 put together. The piece’s framing is blunt about what that means for ordinary buyers: this is not a pipeline. It is a flood, and the caution comes wrapped in numbers.
Start with the mechanics of the biggest one. SpaceX filed a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1 under the codename Project Apex, put together a syndicate of 21 banks, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America leading it, and made the filing public on May 20. The document set a Nasdaq debut under the ticker SPCX for June 12, if the roadshow held, with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion, which would rank the company third among American listings on day one, trailing only Apple and Nvidia, and a $75 billion raise. What the science of the balance sheet shows is less celestial: $18.67 billion in consolidated 2025 revenue after the February acquisition of xAI, adjusted EBITDA of $6.58 billion, an operating loss of $2.59 billion, a net loss of $4.94 billion and an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion. The valuation implies roughly 94 times sales, richer than Tesla at its 2010 debut and richer than nearly any public company trading today. Retail buyers get 30% of the deal, about $22.5 billion, three times the norm for this size; Elon Musk, holding 85.1% of voting power through ten-vote Class B shares, sells nothing, and his performance grant of about 1.3 billion shares vests partly on colonizing Mars with one million settlers.
Intriguingly, the engine underneath is real. Starlink, the satellite broadband arm, brought in $11.4 billion during 2025, 61% of the company’s sales, up 49.8% on the year at a 63% EBITDA margin, and the S-1 sizes its addressable market, excluding China and Russia, at $28.5 trillion. The drag is xAI, which lost $2.47 billion operationally in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with the Grok chatbot under regulatory investigation across eight agencies over nonconsensual synthetic imagery, and the company plans $20.7 billion a year of capital expenditure, Meta-and-Microsoft territory. A cash-generating satellite operator bolted to an AI unit that loses money is the actual product on offer.
The other two floats are smaller bets on the same theme. Anthropic, reportedly filing confidentially as a Public Benefit Corporation, is eyeing an October debut at or above $900 billion with a $60 billion raise, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs said to be in early talks to lead it and no S-1 yet; its revenue run rate left $9 billion behind at the close of 2025 and passed $30 billion by April, roughly 80% of it from enterprise customers, with Amazon and Google having pledged upward of $70 billion in equity and cloud backing and break-even expected by 2028. OpenAI, on $852 billion post-money from a record $122 billion March round and 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, is projected to lose $14 billion this year, does not expect profitability before 2029 or 2030, and HSBC estimates it may need more than $207 billion more by 2030; its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly told insiders the listing conditions will not be met before year-end, pointing the window to late 2026 or early 2027.
What researchers found on the wider market only sharpens the caution. Venture investors poured about $300 billion into roughly 6,000 startups in the first quarter of 2026 alone, 80% of it AI-linked, even as the whole of 2025 saw $171.8 billion raised worldwide across 1,293 listings, and Crunchbase research lead Gene Teare called the early months of this year “much slower than was expected.” The chipmaker Cerberus rose 68% on debut and dropped 10% the next session, a two-day lesson in both the ferocity and the fragility of AI demand, while a wave of pulled smaller offerings, the SaaSpocalypse, dampened the run-up. One market analysis calls the three-way collision an “oversupply” in shares and the Musk machine the “elephant in the room.” The serious point comes from Minmo Gahng, who teaches finance at Cornell: booming revenues, he notes, are being spent on hardware so fast that none of the three is likely to be profitable soon, and disclosure will change them. “Once you go public, companies can no longer cherry pick what pieces of information they want to disclose.” For buyers, the lesson predates all three deals: an IPO is a mechanism, not a promise, and the price of the front-row seat is written in the filing.
Sources
- 2026 AI IPO Boom: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX — The AI Chronicle
- SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs: Wall Street's $200B AI Test – The Economy
