Starships and unicorns

A record-breaking wave of IPOs lies ahead as Elon Musk’s SpaceX blasts off with two other trillion-dollar US ‘unicorns’, Anthropic and OpenAI, close behind. While providing a first taste of direct investment into AI, and into outer space, these vast offerings will be akin to adding the entire FTSE All-Share Index to the Nasdaq 100 this year.

You could be forgiven for thinking that 2026 is the year that ‘Skynet’ goes live. Headlines have been dominated by the unprecedented size and ambition of this year’s three ‘mega’ IPOs (initial public offering), and the staggering sums involved. Behind the scenes, index providers have been busily rewriting their rulebooks to accommodate these newly-hatched tech titans, while Wall Street has created an entirely new set of IPO mechanics to bring these colossal companies to market.

If nothing else, 2026 should be remembered not only as the year that the AI ecosystem moved from the tech labs of Silicon Valley into the public domain, but also the year that stock market investing “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to become truly extra-terrestrial.

Below we’ve provided a thumbnail sketch of each of this year’s IPO giants and how they relate to one another, together with an assessment of the impact this unprecedented surge in new issuance may have on major stock market indices.

Shooting for the stars: SpaceX
The first, and largest, to reach the launch pad was SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket-ship company, now with ‘xAI’ in the cargo hold thanks to a recent merger of the two Musk-owned entities.

When Alphabet invested in SpaceX back in 2015, the company was worth just $12bn. Its June IPO, targeting a record $75bn raise, valued the company at $1.78trn, with shares trading at 92 times 2025 revenue, compared to just 3.75 times for the S&P 500 Index of US companies.

Moonshot
Mr Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the mission to develop reusable rockets. Its ‘do or die’ 2008 launch of the Falcon 1 rocket was the stuff of boys’ fiction that ultimately positioned the company as NASA’s de facto successor. Today Musk’s two reusable rockets – the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy – account for around 85% of global space freight having reduced orbital transit costs from c$18,500/kg to just $1,400/kg.

The SpaceX prospectus shows the company is now split into three segments: connectivity, space and AI.

• Connectivity, driven by Starlink, is the only profitable division, generating $11.4bn of the group’s $18.7bn revenue in 2025.
• Space operations produced $4.1bn in revenue but posted a $650m loss due to heavy R&D spending on Starship — the vessel intended to take humans to Mars and reduce freight costs to $100/kg, roughly the price of premium lobster.
• AI, the most strategically important segment, emerged after SpaceX merged with xAI in February. The deal valued SpaceX at $1trn and xAI – creator of the irreverent Grok chatbot – at $250bn.

While xAI generated $3.2bn of revenue last year, it ran up losses of twice this due to massive capital expenditure. Even so, Musk has already engineered a turnaround by leasing excess capacity from the ‘Colossus 1’ supercomputer in Tennessee. Anthropic agreed to pay $15bn annually for three years to support its Claude model, and Google soon signed a similar deal. These agreements lifted annual revenue from SpaceX’s terrestrial infrastructure to $24bn, a remarkable reversal given that only five years ago, Google was supplying SpaceX with the computing power needed for Starlink.

Gravitational pull
The SpaceX prospectus estimates its total addressable market (meaning the value of 100% of all revenues in the sector) at $28.5trn, with $26.5trn of this in AI. In the run up to the 12 June IPO, Goldman Sachs, the deal’s lead bank, forecast that SpaceX’s AI revenues could grow 100-fold in five years – from $3.2bn in 2025, to some $322bn by 2030. Alongside this, Morgan Stanley, a fellow underwriter, envisioned the company’s revenue hitting $3.4tn by 2040.

While the opportunity set may be great, it’s still a ‘giant leap for mankind’ to value SpaceX at 92 times revenues (at the time of writing). The valuation reflects not only the scale of the opportunity but also the ‘Elon Musk factor’ – the extraordinary investor loyalty that has long buoyed Tesla’s valuation relative to its peers.

Musk set the IPO price at $135 per share and insisted that retail investors receive triple the usual allocation. The result: Musk became the world’s first, newly-minted trillionaire, and he now controls two of the ten largest US companies by market capitalisation.

For all mankind: Anthropic
Anthropic, creator of the Claude family of AI models, is the second of the world’s most valuable private companies to pursue an IPO this year.

It was founded just five years ago, by a splinter group of defectors from OpenAI; since then, its growth has been parabolic. Just days before filing its IPO prospectus on 1 June, the company raised $65bn through a funding round valuing it at $900bn. This saw Anthropic’s value pass that of its arch rival OpenAI for the first time and puts it on course for a $1trn IPO.

Anthropic has raised around $130bn since inception, half of it in the latest round. Company disclosures indicate that Q2 2026 will be its first profitable quarter, with revenues expected to double to around $10.9bn and operating profit reaching $559m.

While the founders and employees of Anthropic collectively hold the largest share of the company (47%), other notable investors include Amazon (17%) and Alphabet (Google) which owns 15%.

Anthropology
Anthropic’s core team left OpenAI over ethical concerns and the company’s structure reflects this ethos. It is structured as a public benefit corporation (in Delaware) with ownership held in a trust comprised of five trustees. They have no financial interest in the company and just one goal: to keep Anthropic performing according to its mission. Meanwhile, all seven of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of the wealth they accrue.

Ethical considerations pervade every aspect of Anthropic’s being and naturally extend to its all-conquering ‘Claude’ family of AI models. These are trained using the company’s unique ‘Constitutional AI’ approach, which steers AI models to align with intended preferences and ethical principles. These principles led to a high profile clash with the US Department of Defence early in 2026, when Anthropic refused it unrestricted use of Claude due to concerns over lethal autonomous warfare and domestic mass surveillance.

The dispute escalated into litigation, with the Pentagon labelling Anthropic a “supply‑chain risk” and President Trump branding its leadership “woke… leftwing nut jobs”.

Even so, by pivoting away from OpenAI's focus on consumer chatbots (ChatGPT), Anthropic has found great success in delivering enterprise capabilities. Claude’s Cowork tool disrupted the software-as-a-service sector, triggering a 30% sell-off in software stocks earlier this year. Its legal and professional services capabilities undermined stock prices for accounting, legal, logistics, real estate, media, data analytics and financial services companies.

Consequently, Anthropic has been described as the ‘anti-OpenAI’ thanks to its focus on enterprise markets, its pro-regulation stance and a likable tendency to warn about the negative impacts of AI proliferation such as major job losses. After releasing the most powerful AI model yet, Mythos, CEO, Dario Amodei, published a policy essay calling on US legislators to essentially regulate harder and faster as with the advent of ‘self-improving AI’ the risks to national and corporate security were no longer theoretical.

The Trump administration responded swiftly. On 12 June it gave Anthropic just 90 minutes to comply with its new export controls on Fable and Mythos, which forbade access to foreign nationals. Anthropic was forced to suspend both models for all users, including US nationals.

The Age of Ultron?
Mythos is extraordinarily capable and deeply concerning. It can identify and exploit dormant vulnerabilities in decades‑old code with ease. Initially restricted to just 50 partners, it identified and resolved more than 10,000 critical security flaws within hours.

Mythos poses such immense risks that it’s spawned ‘Project Glasswing’, an international initiative to bolster cybersecurity against Mythos and its kind. By early June 2026, Glasswing was expanded to 150 new organisations across 15 countries. At the same time, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, essentially Mythos with a new set of guardrails, with queries as to cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry routed elsewhere. It is considered state-of-the-art by the AI world.

Sparking a revolution: OpenAI
OpenAI fired the starting gun on the AI race with its launch of the ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022. It immediately became the fastest-growing application in history taking just two months to amass 100 million monthly users. By the time of the SpaceX IPO in June 2026, it had hit a billion.

Analysts now expect to see OpenAI targeting a $60bn IPO at a valuation of $1trn as soon as September this year. It was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab, most notably by Sam Altman (the current CEO), and the omnipresent Elon Musk, among others.

Despite its ‘first-mover’ status, it’s been a turbulent journey for OpenAI from its original non-profit structure to today’s hybrid arrangement. Along the way there was an epic court battle with Musk, not to mention the brief ousting of Sam Altman in 2023 by his board, before he was reinstated days later.

Today, OpenAI operates under a hybrid structure: the non-profit OpenAI Foundation controls 26% of the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Microsoft owns 27%, with the remainder held by employees and investors.

Powerful friends
OpenAI raised a mammoth $122bn earlier in 2026 thanks to backing from Amazon, Nvidia and Japan’s Softbank. This created a valuation of $852bn. As yet, with no prospectus release, there’s little information on the current financial position of the company. However, a company blog post soon after the funding round purported the business was generating $2bn in monthly revenues.

Even so, OpenAI doesn’t expect to be profitable until 2030 as it plans to invest more than $600bn in ‘compute’ before that. This hasn’t stopped President Trump from claiming that the US government will be taking an equity stake in the company, via a ‘public wealth fund’ from which “American people can benefit”.

Changing the game…
This trio of colossal IPOs represents a historic stress test for US markets, with AI‑related firms already comprising roughly 40% of the value of the S&P 500 Index of US companies.

Adding to the anxiety is the fact that, in preparation for their arrival, the Nasdaq Index changed its rules for inclusion, as have the Morningstar and FTSE Russell index providers.

In the case of the Nasdaq 100 Index, not only will it now consider both listed and unlisted share classes when determining eligibility, but its new ‘fast track’ entry route enables any new listing ranking within the top 40 of the index by size to be included in the index within 15 days of IPO. This forces both active and passive managers to buy the stock rapidly.

The Nasdaq 100 has also replaced its 10% minimum float rule (concerning the proportion of shares traded publicly) with a cap on the initial weighting for companies which float less than a third of their shares. This cap is set at three times the value of the float, tripling the liquidity available if the company was weighted on a ‘free-float adjusted’ market capitalisation basis. In the case of SpaceX, which floated at $75bn of shares, the cap is set at $225bn – giving an initial index weighting of around 0.56% of the Nasdaq 100 Index.

Meanwhile, recent Financial Times estimates suggest that active fund managers who wish to stay ‘neutral’ on SpaceX would still need to buy over $14bn of its stock in the three weeks following its IPO – over $13bn more than if the index listing rules had remained unchanged.

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