This week something kicks off that will shape the AI industry all year: the big IPO wave. SpaceX goes first, launching its IPO roadshow in the week of June 8 — and bringing xAI right along with it.
The biggest IPO ever
The numbers are absurdly large. SpaceX is targeting a fixed roadshow price of 135 dollars per share, which values the company at around 1.77 trillion dollars — more than Tesla. The Nasdaq debut is planned for June 12. If it lands there, it would be the largest IPO in history, more than three times the size of the previous record holder, Alibaba.
The AI angle sits inside xAI: Elon Musk merged SpaceX and his AI company into a single entity in February, valued at 1.25 trillion dollars. Buy SpaceX, and you’re buying a slice of Grok too.
Anthropic and OpenAI on approach
SpaceX is just the opener. Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO paperwork in early June, and OpenAI is preparing its own. Both reportedly want to go public this year. For the first time, the pure-play AI labs step directly in front of the public markets — and suddenly have to justify their trillion-dollar valuations to ordinary investors.
My take
To me, this is the moment the AI story grows up. So far the giant rounds happened in private capital, among pros who can price the risk. Public markets are different: quarterly numbers matter, short sellers exist, and every delay gets punished.
What I care about most is Anthropic. A publicly traded Anthropic has to open its books — and that finally gives us a real look at the economics behind Claude. Is revenue growing faster than compute costs? That’s the question that decides the whole field. Soon we’ll get answers in the form of actual financials, not press releases.
Sources: CNBC, CNBC, TechCrunch