On Friday, June 12, SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in history. The stock opened under the ticker SPCX at $150, well above its $135 offering price, and closed up 19 percent at roughly $161. It raised around $75 billion – more than Saudi Aramco in 2019. The valuation jumped above two trillion dollars on day one.
Why does this belong on a site about Claude and AI? Because SpaceX absorbed xAI entirely back in February. Grok and the whole AI division now sit inside this publicly traded giant. And because this listing is the icebreaker for a wave coming right behind it.
The icebreaker
Anthropic and OpenAI have both already filed confidential S-1s with the SEC – Anthropic on June 1 at a valuation around $965 billion, OpenAI a week later at roughly $852 billion. Both are on the starting blocks. And both are now watching very closely how the market reacts to SpaceX.
That’s what makes this day so interesting. SpaceX is the stress test. When a company gets valued at 100x its revenue and the market still piles in, that’s a signal: the money is there, and the appetite is there. The banker consensus – that there’s an advantage to being first to list and set the terms for the sector – looks pretty right after a day like this.
My read on it
For the record, Elon Musk isn’t selling a single share and keeps full voting control through a dual-class structure. A third of the shares went to retail investors – triple the usual allocation. Both help explain the wild first day.
My take: I’m cautious about the euphoria. Up 19 percent on day one is a bet on a decade of flawless execution, not on today’s quarterly numbers. But for those of us watching AI, the interesting question is a different one: does SpaceX actually open the door for Anthropic and OpenAI? If it does, we could see the company behind Claude go public this year. And that would change the whole industry – from how models get funded to how openly a publicly traded AI lab can still talk about risk.
Sources: CNBC: SpaceX IPO, NPR: SpaceX stock gains 19% on first day, Nasdaq: SpaceX IPO