Startups

SpaceX surges 19% on debut as OpenAI and Anthropic queue up a $3.6 trillion AI IPO pipeline

Elon Musk's rocket-and-AI conglomerate closed its first day at a $2 trillion market cap, clearing the runway for confidential filings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-06-14 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Nicholas Cappello — Stock market ticker board displaying share prices in green and red

SpaceX opened at $150 on Friday, ran to an intraday high of $176.52, and closed at $161.11, a 19.34% pop above its $135 offer price that valued Elon Musk’s rocket-and-AI conglomerate at roughly $2 trillion on day one. Priced at the strike, the company already cleared $1.77 trillion in market cap, making it the sixth-largest publicly traded company in the United States, trailing Amazon’s $2.54 trillion by a margin investors clearly intend to close.

The prospectus tells a more complicated story. SpaceX disclosed $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since 2002, alongside a $60 billion option to acquire the code-generation startup Cursor this year, with a $10 billion walk-away fee if it declines. That’s the financial architecture of a company being underwritten less on cash flows than on Musk’s option value across launch, satellite broadband, and the xAI assets, Grok and X, that SpaceX absorbed in February.

The debut isn’t really about SpaceX alone. It’s the opening act of a roughly $3.6 trillion AI IPO pipeline, with SpaceX at about $1.8 trillion, Anthropic at $965 billion, and OpenAI’s most recent funding round at $852 billion. On Forge Global, the secondary market has already moved further out: Anthropic touched $1 trillion in recent trading, and OpenAI sat near $880 billion in April.

OpenAI is the third major AI developer to file confidentially with the SEC, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The filing carries a careful hedge about “things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” and CFO Sarah Friar told the AP in April the company was already “acting with the good hygiene of a public company.” Friar has noted that the current valuation would slot OpenAI somewhere around the 15th largest name in the S&P 500. The Wall Street Journal puts projected cash burn at $85 billion in 2028, even after sales double.

Capital Economics offered the analyst-desk read: “If these mega IPOs are well-received, many more companies are likely to ride the wave of investor enthusiasm by going public.” The 1999 comparison writes itself, but the more useful parallel is the 2019 cohort: Uber, Lyft, WeWork’s withdrawn S-1, companies that priced private narratives into public order books and discovered the two audiences read disclosures differently. The pipeline is already $3.6 trillion. The disclosures are only starting to arrive.

Sources