Markets SPCX JUN 14, 2026

SpaceX debuts at $2 trillion as OpenAI, Anthropic queue an AI IPO pipeline worth $3.6T

SPCX closed up 19.34% Friday after raising $75B in the largest IPO on record, with OpenAI's confidential S-1 and Anthropic's $965B round next in line.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

SpaceX closed its first day on Nasdaq Friday at $161.11, up 19.34% from a $135 strike, pushing the company’s intraday market value above $2 trillion and putting SPCX within striking distance of Amazon, pegged by Bloomberg at roughly $2.54 trillion the same afternoon. The offering itself sold more than 555 million shares and raised about $75 billion, per CNN’s tally, the largest IPO on record.

The arithmetic is its own story. At the $135 strike, 13.076 billion shares outstanding implied a $1.77 trillion market cap before the tape even opened; shares opened at $150, touched $176.52 intraday per CNBC, and kept climbing in extended trading. The prospectus, meanwhile, disclosed $41.3 billion in cumulative losses since 2002, and COO Gwynne Shotwell told reporters she “wasn’t sure” the company would ever go public. February’s absorption of xAI, which folded Grok, the X social network, and xAI’s data centers into SpaceX, is part of what made it legible to public markets.

It also reopens a door that’s been closed for the better part of a decade for the most-watched private companies. “The window is open, SpaceX has opened it,” said Robert Greifeld, the former Nasdaq chief, who added he “would definitely bet” OpenAI and Anthropic follow this year.

The pipeline is already forming. OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC on Monday, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, having last marked at $852 billion in a $122 billion March round. Anthropic disclosed its own IPO intentions on June 1 and raised at a $965 billion valuation last month. Bloomberg pegs the combined AI listing queue at roughly $3.6 trillion.

OpenAI was careful about the framing. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while,” the company said in its disclosure post, which is the kind of sentence written by a CFO, in this case Sarah Friar, who knows the market is now setting the timetable, not her.

The backdrop is less euphoric than the SPCX print suggests. The Nasdaq logged three straight down sessions into Friday, and Broadcom fell more than 13% last week despite 48% Q2 revenue growth, its worst week since September 2024. A two-decade private company breaks the seal at a $2 trillion valuation while the index it joined is selling off, and the next two filers behind it are already worth nearly a trillion each on paper. The window didn’t open because conditions are good. It opened because waiting got more expensive than going.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.