Every Tuesday afternoon we publish a collection of topics and give our expert opinion about the Equity Markets.
In our 2 June edition, we broke down the SpaceX IPO in detail: the Starlink business, the xAI complications, the governance structure and what Australian investors needed to weigh before the listing. SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on 12 June after raising USD $75 billion. It was the largest IPO in stock market history. And it is only the first of three.
Over the next six months, SpaceX will be followed to public markets by OpenAI and Anthropic. Combined, the three companies are targeting valuations that add up to roughly USD $3.6 trillion. That is approximately the GDP of France. None of them are profitable by conventional accounting. All three are asking investors to price not what they earn today, but what they believe the world becomes tomorrow. That is a genuinely different kind of investment proposition, and it deserves a clear-eyed framework before the next two listings arrive.
The Three Companies and Where They Stand
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX — now listed) debuted at a target valuation of approx. USD $1.7 trillion, raising USD $75 billion in the largest public offering ever recorded. As covered in our previous edition, Starlink is the profitable core of the business, generating USD $11.4 billion in revenue and USD $4.4 billion in operating profit in 2025. The xAI segment, which includes the Grok AI assistant and the X platform, lost USD $6.4 billion in 2025 and burned a further USD $2.5 billion in Q1 2026 alone. SpaceX has the most diversified business case of the three, with real revenue across launch services, satellite internet and AI infrastructure. It is also the most complex, given the breadth of Elon Musk's commercial interests folded into the one structure. Early trading suggests investors remain willing to look through the losses in the xAI segment and focus on the cash-generative strength of Starlink and the broader strategic value of SpaceX's infrastructure assets.
OpenAI is targeting an IPO as early as September 2026 at a valuation approaching USD $1 trillion. The company behind ChatGPT has grown its annualised revenue to an estimated USD $10-$15 billion by mid-2026, driven by an installed base of approximately 900 million monthly active users. The pitch is scale: OpenAI has the largest consumer AI footprint in the world and the most recognised brand in the space. The complication is cost. Running frontier AI models at that scale requires enormous GPU infrastructure. OpenAI committed to more than 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, and the gap between revenue growth and compute expenditure means profitability remains a future-state assumption rather than a near-term reality.
Anthropic filed for a US IPO on 1 June 2026, targeting an October listing at a valuation around USD $900-$965 billion. Annualised revenue reached USD $30 billion in April 2026, up from USD $9 billion at the end of 2025. Approximately 80% of Anthropic's revenue is enterprise-derived, which provides a more predictable and defensible revenue base than OpenAI's consumer-heavy mix. Anthropic is positioning itself as the safety-first AI platform for regulated industries including healthcare, finance and law. The company expects to report its first quarterly operating profit before the listing, which would make it the only one of the three to reach that milestone at IPO.
The Valuation Question
Conventional valuation analysis struggles at this scale and this stage. What you are really buying across all three companies is a belief about the future. SpaceX's story is global connectivity infrastructure and commercial space. OpenAI's story is that it reaches artificial general intelligence first and captures a significant share of the software economy. Anthropic's is that regulated industries choose safety over raw capability, and that Anthropic owns that segment. OpenAI and Anthropic are being valued more like potential platform monopolies, with investors focused on revenue growth, model capability and market share rather than earnings. The market is effectively pricing the possibility that a small number of AI leaders become foundational technology platforms underpinning future software and productivity spending.
The BPC View
The SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs represent the most significant concentration of transformative technology entering public markets in a single year since the dot-com era. The opportunity is significant, but so too are the expectations embedded in current valuations. History shows that transformative technologies can ultimately justify extraordinary market capitalisations, but the path is rarely linear. Many of the defining companies of the internet era went public in 1999 and 2000, yet their valuations often took years or even decades to grow into, and some never did.
That is not a reason to avoid these opportunities. It is a reason to approach them with the same discipline you would apply to any investment: understand what you are buying, size positions appropriately, and distinguish between a compelling technology and a compelling investment at a given valuation.
What is not in doubt is the scale of the underlying transformation. AI infrastructure, satellite connectivity and frontier model development are reshaping industries, creating new markets and challenging established companies. Whether current valuations ultimately prove justified or excessive, these businesses sit at the centre of some of the most important technological shifts of the next decade.
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