Can the Stock Market Swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

A Trillion-Dollar Wave Rolls Toward Wall Street

Three of the world’s most valuable private companies are about to knock on the public market’s door at nearly the same time. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are each preparing stock market debuts at valuations that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. Together, they could raise more fresh capital than any prior cluster of technology offerings—including the wave that preceded the dot-com bust.

SpaceX aims for a valuation as high as $1.75 trillion when it lists on the Nasdaq in June 2026. OpenAI is targeting a $1 trillion public valuation. Anthropic, not far behind, is in talks with investors that could value it near $900 billion. Those numbers are so large that they naturally raise a blunt question: can the stock market swallow three multi-trillion-dollar companies in a single year without choking?

As the data visualization below shows, these businesses operate on a scale that dwarfs previous tech unicorns. Even the smallest among them, Anthropic, carried a post-money valuation of $350 billion after its 2025 funding rounds. OpenAI’s secondary share sale in October 2025 priced the company at $500 billion, while SpaceX jumped to $1.25 trillion after merging with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI. A summary table of key metrics sits just above this article, and it makes one thing obvious: the usual IPO playbook doesn’t apply here.

SpaceX’s June 2026 Debut

SpaceX is set to trade under ticker symbol SPCX on the Nasdaq, according to its official prospectus. The company confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2026 and plans to start its roadshow on June 8. It has already disclosed some striking details. Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, owns 7.1 million Class B shares—each carrying ten times the voting power of Class A stock. Early Founders Fund partner Luke Nosek holds 33 million Class A shares. (See our coverage of four market pros’ views on the SpaceX IPO for more detail.)

The sheer size of the offering is historic. At a $1.75 trillion target, SpaceX alone would be one of the most valuable public companies on the planet, roughly comparable to the entire German stock market at certain points. In 2025, the company generated $15 billion in revenue, a figure that makes its sky-high valuation look more like a bet on decades of future growth than on near-term earnings. The merger with xAI, which brought in hardware leases worth more than $20 billion, further complicated the financial picture. From January 2025 to February 2026, xAI paid back $1.7 billion of that lease value, while SpaceX’s social network X paid $1 million to Valor in both 2024 and 2025.

The AI IPO Race: OpenAI vs. Anthropic

Unlike SpaceX, which operates rockets and satellites, OpenAI and Anthropic are pure artificial intelligence plays. Both have been racing to get to the public markets first, in part because investor appetite for generative AI has been enormous. OpenAI’s ChatGPT kicked off the current AI spending boom in late 2022, but the company has faced questions about spending discipline, revenue targets, and leadership turnover. Still, it remains the household name and is pushing for a debut as early as the fourth quarter of 2026, according to regulatory signals and industry reports. (We examined the rivalry in depth in our comparison of OpenAI and Anthropic’s 2025 valuations.)

Anthropic, on the other hand, quietly gained ground. Its Claude family of models attracted intense enterprise adoption, and a rumored new model, Claude Mythos, stirred enough excitement in March 2026 to momentarily push its implied valuation ahead of OpenAI’s on prediction markets. Anthropic is reportedly eyeing an IPO as soon as October 2026. Between 2023 and 2025, the two AI labs raised staggering sums from venture capital and strategic investors: $44 billion for Anthropic and $58 billion for OpenAI, according to Federal Reserve data. Those capital infusions have been essential because building leading AI models requires immense computing power. Public reports put OpenAI’s workforce at around 4,000 people and Anthropic’s at 2,500—lean teams relative to their financial footprints.

Can the Stock Market Absorb Three Mega-IPOs?

Markets have handled giant public offerings before. Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO raised $25.6 billion at a valuation of about $2 trillion, and Alibaba’s 2014 debut remains a landmark. But no year has ever seen multiple companies simultaneously attempt to go public at valuations approaching or exceeding $1 trillion. The combined capital targeted by SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could be immense, and some analysts have drawn uneasy comparisons. Investor Michael Burry noted that this wave may raise more money than the 446 technology IPOs that hit the market between 1999 and 2000, before the dot-com crash.

The plumbing of the financial system matters. Major technology firms are already pouring money into AI infrastructure. In 2025, quarterly capital expenditures at Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle reached $131 billion—about 1.31% of U.S. GDP—and the annual total hit $412 billion. That spending suggests deep conviction in AI’s future, but it also means that institutional portfolios are already heavily exposed to the theme. Adding three more trillion-dollar companies could strain the market’s ability to absorb all that fresh equity without some re-pricing of existing assets.

On the other side of the argument, global liquidity remains deep, and the rise of passive investing means index funds will mechanically buy any new mega-cap stock once it qualifies for major benchmarks—though usually after a waiting period. SpaceX’s sheer liquidity and the options market that will likely follow could smooth its entry. For pure AI companies, investor enthusiasm has repeatedly surprised to the upside, as the rapid re-valuation of Anthropic and OpenAI shows.

Cautionary Voices and Investor Sentiment

Not everyone is sanguine. Some market professionals point out that the public market is less forgiving than late-stage venture rounds. A company that has been valued at $500 billion in a private secondary deal might find public markets unwilling to pay a similar premium once quarterly earnings reports arrive. Internal disagreements have surfaced at OpenAI over the IPO timeline, with CEO Sam Altman reportedly favoring a faster debut than the CFO. Meanwhile, both companies face rivals like Google DeepMind, which employs roughly 6,000 people, and Elon Musk’s xAI, which remains embedded inside SpaceX’s corporate structure.

The behavior of long-term investors is also worth watching. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on nearly $400 billion in cash. Some interpret that as caution ahead of a major market shift. The same mood shows up in rising bearish bets against high-flying AI hardware and software names. If a few mega-IPOs suck up available capital too quickly, it could leave less oxygen for secondary offerings and smaller growth companies.

Yet the history of transformative technology waves suggests that markets usually find a way to price in the genuinely dominant players. The internet era produced Amazon and Google, whose early public valuations now look quaint. Today’s AI leaders may have similarly long runways—if they can manage costs and avoid the kind of profitless growth that punished earlier tech generations.

Conclusion

The 2026 IPO window is unlike anything the modern market has seen. SpaceX will almost certainly go first and set the tone. If its debut is orderly and followed by steady institutional demand, it could build confidence for the AI companies that follow. If instead the sheer size overwhelms short-term liquidity or triggers a broader rotation away from high-growth equities, the later IPOs could face a much chillier welcome.

What is clear is that the market’s capacity will be tested not just by the dollar amounts but by the story each company tells about its path to sustained profitability. SpaceX’s revenue is tangible but capital-intensive. OpenAI and Anthropic have thinner, younger revenue streams and must convince public investors that their AI platforms will eventually generate enormous returns. The absorption question isn’t really about whether the stock market can mechanically process these offerings—it can. It’s about whether the investing public will continue writing trillion-dollar checks at a moment when both optimism and caution are running at extreme levels.

For anyone watching, the next six months will reveal whether the “trillion-dollar trio” can glide through the IPO window or whether the window slams shut after the first one through.