SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic IPOs: Can the Market Absorb Them—but Can It Digest Them?

Article by Wenwu Zhao

Any discussion about whether the market can absorb it is essentially an arithmetic problem of liquidity. First, let’s look at the hard data from the three platforms.

SpaceX issued at a fixed price of $135 per share.
Note that this is a "fixed price," not the usual range of quotes—a "take it or leave it" stance that itself signals extreme confidence in demand.
The company plans to issue 5.556 billion shares, raising approximately $75 billion and valuing it at $1.77 trillion, surpassing Tesla to become the seventh-largest company in the U.S. The underwriting syndicate is led by Goldman Sachs, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase following.
What was the result? The offering stage attracted over $250 billion in subscription demand, 3.5 to 4 times the $75 billion fundraising target.
On its first day of trading, volume exceeded 500 million shares, the closing price reached $160, and the market capitalization surpassed $2.1 trillion. In the words of CNBC, investors that day "had a hard time finding anything to criticize."

OpenAI follows closely. The company secretly filed its S-1 with the SEC on June 8–9, 2026, targeting a valuation of approximately $1 trillion, with some reports suggesting a range between $850 billion and $1 trillion; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, with an IPO window expected between September and the fourth quarter of 2026. However, OpenAI’s financial profile is far more striking. According to an analysis by a European business magazine of its finances, the company loses about $1.22 for every dollar it earns.
Cash burn for the full year 2026 is projected to reach approximately $27 billion. More interestingly, the market’s own assessment: on the prediction platform Polymarket, traders have priced the probability of OpenAI completing a true IPO by the end of June at just 4%, and around 40% by year-end.
This suggests that the market views this secret filing as a real but distant catalyst, rather than an imminent event. OpenAI itself has used phrasing such as "may be a while" to temper market expectations.

Anthropic has the most compelling financial story among the three. It secretly filed its S-1 ahead of OpenAI on June 1, 2026, and could go public as early as this autumn. Its latest valuation stands at $965 billion, and it is likely to surpass the $1 trillion mark at its IPO, with plans to list on Nasdaq targeting October 2026.
Its growth curve is almost distorted: annual revenue rose from $870 million in January 2024 to $10 billion in December 2024, $90 billion by the end of 2025, $14 billion in February 2026, $19 billion in March, and $30 billion in April. The most critical difference lies in profitability: Anthropic expects to achieve its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million this quarter (Q2 2026), with revenue of $10.9 billion—a 130% increase from $4.8 billion in Q1.
This means that among the three, Anthropic may be the only company able to demonstrate to the public before going public that it spends less than it earns.

Add up these three: The three IPOs combined could seek more than $200 billion from the public markets, while the entire U.S. IPO market raised only $45 billion for the full year of 2025. In other words, these three companies aim to withdraw more than four times the total amount raised by all U.S. IPOs last year, within just a few months.
This is the full weight of the question: "Can the market absorb it?"

If you only read the headlines, you might think Wall Street is cheering. But the real sentiment is highly divided—and that division itself is the data.

The bullish logic is based on the argument of ample liquidity.
Around $8 trillion sits in U.S. money market funds; SpaceX’s $75 billion fundraising amounts to just about 1% of that—a proportion that doesn’t seem threatening at first glance. Bullish investors have an even deeper argument: for years, institutional investors could only access AI indirectly—buying NVIDIA for chip exposure, Microsoft for indirect ownership of OpenAI, or Alphabet for exposure to DeepMind and Anthropic. Now, for the first time, they can invest directly in a pure-play asset, and this pent-up demand is real. SpaceX’s 3.5 to 4 times oversubscription is empirical proof of this logic.

The bearish logic is the liquidity siphon theory.

Bank of America's chief investment strategist, Michael Hartnett, believes this epic IPO cycle is essentially "a large-scale transfer of risk accumulated by early investors to the public markets."

This statement is harsh, but it gets to the heart of what an IPO really is.

VCs and employees cash out and exit, leaving retail investors and index funds to take over.

Shorts are not worried about having insufficient funds, but about the chain reaction of funds being withdrawn.

In fact, this concern has already materialized once: On June 5, 2026, the Nasdaq plunged 4.18% in a single day, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index crashed 10.3%, and the chip sector lost over $1.2 trillion in market value in one day, with NVIDIA dropping about 6% and Micron falling 13%. Analysts generally believe that the impending IPO wave from the three giants is draining liquidity from Wall Street, forcing institutions to sell chip stocks to free up cash.

Another type is "surrender long."

This is the portrait I believe best reflects Wall Street’s true mindset. Amy Wu Silverman, Head of Derivatives Strategy at RBC, noted that a client described himself as "fully short," yet his portfolio appeared heavily long—he remained in the market because "not being long in AI stocks carries professional risk." This mindset—knowing it might be a bubble but fearing to miss out—exactly characterizes the late stage of a bubble.

Internally at Goldman Sachs, even they are divided. Analyst Covello recalled that in 2024, he estimated it would take 18 months to two years to determine whether the capital flowing into AI infrastructure would generate returns commensurate with the spending. He told his colleagues that we have long surpassed that timeframe, yet the returns have yet to materialize.

His colleague, George Lee, Co-Head of Goldman Sachs Global Research, is more optimistic, but even optimists acknowledge a stark premise: the world may ultimately spend $7 to $8 trillion on AI infrastructure, but merely "disrupting" existing profit pools won't fill that gap—this math only adds up if AI generates substantial net new economic activity, and current enterprise ROI data remains disappointing. The question “Do enterprises make or save money implementing AI?” remains the ultimate悬在所有AI估值之上的终极问号.

From the context of the event, this is not merely an issue of funding needs, but also involves some deeper characteristics of the U.S. technology industry.

Capital has a method for valuing future-oriented narratives. SpaceX isn’t just selling rocket launches and Starlink coverage—it’s selling the vision of Mars colonization and a global internet. OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t selling current revenue or profits—they’re selling the promise of technological leadership when general artificial intelligence arrives. The ability to assign a current market value to “the future” is a hallmark skill of the U.S. capital markets. Compared to the dot-com bubble of 1999, the difference today is that these companies actually have real revenue growth. Anthropic scaled from tens of millions in revenue to tens of billions in just over two years—something those internet companies two decades ago could not achieve. So the question becomes: Where is the boundary? Is this time truly different, or is history simply repeating itself? That’s where the challenge lies.

The founder maintains strong personal control. After the SpaceX offering, Musk will hold over 82% of the voting rights, meaning that retail and institutional investors provide capital but have little influence over decision-making. Musk further amplifies this control through cross-shareholdings across multiple companies—Tesla holds shares in SpaceX, SpaceX merges with xAI, and SpaceX leases AI computing power to other companies. This network of related-party transactions requires investors to fundamentally trust this individual’s judgment.

Retail investors have been actively brought into this round. In traditional IPOs, the retail allocation ratio is 5% to 10%; SpaceX raised this figure to 30%. OpenAI also specifically designed channels for retail participation. The surface rationale is very American: millions of people use ChatGPT and Starlink daily, so let users become shareholders. The deeper effect is that retail investors are absorbing the tail risk of these high-valued assets, whose valuations have not yet been genuinely tested in public markets.

The circular flow of funds forms a closed loop. NVIDIA may invest tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, while OpenAI commits to spending hundreds of billions on computing power, most of which is spent on purchasing NVIDIA chips, and Oracle builds data centers with OpenAI as its anchor client. This structure benefits the revenue and valuation of all parties involved, but also raises a question: Is this money creating new value, or simply circulating repeatedly among existing value?

Returning to your core question, I believe the answer isn’t simply “can handle” or “cannot handle,” but should be viewed in three layers.

First layer: Can a single transaction handle it? Yes.

SpaceX has already demonstrated this with a $2.1 trillion market cap on its first day and oversubscription. The $8 trillion war chest of money market funds objectively exists, and the pent-up demand for pure AI assets is also real. Referencing Cerebras, the chip company’s IPO last month—initially priced at $115–$125, then raised to $150–$160, and ultimately priced at $185—shows that Wall Street’s excitement over pure AI assets is boiling over. Looking at any single company, the market has the capacity to absorb it.

Layer 2, with three consecutive transactions being processed simultaneously, could they cause congestion?

This is the real risk point.

OpenAI and Anthropic submitted simultaneously within the same window, potentially splitting institutional demand and leading to undersubscription or pricing below private market valuations for one or both. This is why the timelines for all three are staggered—SpaceX closed in June, Anthropic is targeting October, and OpenAI is scheduled for September to Q4. The staggered approach reflects underwriters’ clear understanding that the market can absorb the demand, but not all at once.

The third layer, and the deepest one, is whether the fundamentals can support the valuation—that’s the real question.

The fates of these three may diverge completely.

SpaceX has real Starlink subscription cash flow and launch operations; if Anthropic can truly deliver its first profitable quarter, it will prove to the public that AI labs can generate profits, serving as an anchor for the entire sector.

OpenAI is the most vulnerable link, as its registration filing will publicly reveal actual revenue and profit margins for the first time, directly confronting valuations that have far outpaced disclosed financials. If the disclosed margins are significantly lower than investor expectations, the $85 billion valuation could face severe compression, triggering cascading write-downs in VC portfolios heavily weighted in AI.

Notably, Anthropic has a distinguishing feature: it is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) that prioritizes safety oversight above short-term investor pressure. For investors seeking pure returns, this represents governance uncertainty; but for those who believe AI must be constrained, it is a compelling advantage. This design—embedding the mission directly into the corporate charter—is itself a distinctive American narrative, using governance structures to hedge against the risk of technological runaway.

If you could answer your title in one sentence: The market can absorb it, but whether it can digest , depends on the moment OpenAI reveals its financial cards.

SpaceX has already proven that appetite exists. The real test comes in the fall, when OpenAI and Anthropic’s audited financial reports are first exposed to the light, giving the market its first chance to price “humanity’s tomorrow” with real numbers rather than private narratives. The second half of 2026 will be the first true test of whether frontier AI valuations can withstand public market scrutiny.

Historical experience is mixed. According to a Bloomberg survey, strategists generally expect the S&P 500 to reach approximately 7,269 by the end of 2026, about 6% higher than current levels—a gain that appears modest compared to the 80% cumulative increase since 2023 and even below the historical average annual return of 8%.

Wall Street is putting money on the line while frantically buying insurance to hedge its bets. This "fully loaded short" mentality is neither the pure frenzy of 1999 nor the full-blown panic before a crash—it’s a calculated gamble: knowing the mountain is full of tigers, but the greater professional risk is not climbing it.

There is a framework worth remembering: Covello’s question, “Has the company actually made or saved money by deploying AI?” When an AI company’s prospectus can answer this question with real customer ROI data, its trillion-dollar valuation gains a foundation; otherwise, it’s still just selling a very American story about tomorrow.