The Mega-IPOs: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI

Corporate waters.

The Mega-IPOs: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI

The truth behind Mega-IPOs and their multiples.

Three giants are launching IPOs within a suspiciously short period of time.

SpaceX IPO’d at a whopping $1.75 trillion valuation on the 12th of June.

OpenAI followed suit with an S-1 for IPO in May 2026 at a projected valuation ranging between $750b and $850b.

Anthropic did so three weeks ago on the 1st of June 2026 with a valuation of $965b.

There are three things that stand out here.

  1. Valuations: Trillion-dollar companies. This is the first time in history we’re seeing an IPO of that level of magnitude.
  2. Crammed together: They are happening in sequence. Why?
  3. All have the money: Both OpenAI and Anthropic had massive cash injections from Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia. Why IPO?

The typical IPO logic is - you sell to retail investors to raise capital when private/VC/angel investors are not ready to buy stakes at your current valuation.

The primary goal here is cash inflow and, of course, liquidity. Your management and employees can finally cash out their options.

But this time around it seems off. They have cash reserves; they can do a secondary sale if pressured. Then why IPO?

And you know what’s weirder - both OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidentially. This means both have privately submitted their S-1 docs to SEC and potential retail investors won’t get any access to their financial statements until a few weeks before the IPO.

My take - these are not IPOs in a traditional sense. These are choreographed exits, and SpaceX going first is what sets the price that lets the other two sell at the top.

🧭 Context

Before we get to the mechanics, let’s look at the numbers.

Three companies with three different engines under the hood.

Financial Performance Overview

Line the three cards up and the strange part is how little they share.

SpaceX is a profitable business with a cash engine that works today. OpenAI and Anthropic are research labs losing tens of billions a year, with positive cash flow that does not arrive until the end of the decade.

⚙️ The IPO mechanics

The chart shows revenue against evaluation and the multiples behind it.

SpaceX goes out at about 67x its 2025 revenue, OpenAI at 27x its 2026 projected numbers, Anthropic at 21x its May 2026 run-rate.

For the benchmark, a hyped software company typically trades at 15-20x of their revenues. Both OpenAI and Anthropic burn more money than they make.

Of course, you can argue, saying that these are one of the fastest growing companies, building a revolutionary technology and the multiples are justified.

Scott Galloway’s SpaceX S1 breakdown has notable quotes:

277 pages, 14 pages are pictures of rockets, AI is mentioned 1200 times. And a direct quote from a prospectus: “We don’t want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs”.

🎭 The Choreography

SpaceX went first, establishing that a frontier-tech company can carry a trillion-dollar tag in public hands.

Once SpaceX is trading and holding, $965B for Anthropic and $750-850B for OpenAI stop looking insane and start looking like a discount to the leader.

SpaceX manufactures the momentum and the labs ride it. The IPO is the moment that loop finally opens to retail investors.

In a nutshell, follow the money around a circle: Nvidia invests in the labs, the labs spend it on Nvidia chips, and the revenue lands back on Nvidia's income statement.

The big returns on these companies already happened, and they happened in private.

When the Anthropic ticker lights up in October, keep in mind what you are buying: a seat that opened the moment the smart money decided it wanted out.