The IPO that everyone was watching actually happened. SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq on June 12 under the ticker SPCX. It priced at $135 per share, opened at $150, and closed the day at $161, a 19% gain. Volume on day one was over 500 million shares, the second-highest IPO-day volume in Nasdaq history, comparable to Facebook's debut in 2012.
The company raised $75 billion, the largest amount ever raised in a single public offering. At its closing price, the market values SpaceX at roughly $2.1 trillion. For context, that puts it just below Amazon. SpaceX also reserved about 30% of IPO shares for individual investors, an unusual move that drove enormous retail demand. The order book was reportedly more than two times oversubscribed, with around $150 billion in orders chasing a $75 billion raise.
Not everyone is convinced the price is justified. Morningstar, one of Wall Street's most respected independent research firms, values SpaceX at $780 billion, less than half the IPO price. Their analysts call it "significantly overvalued" and point to a specific problem: SpaceX acquired Elon Musk's AI company xAI in February 2026 in a deal that was not conducted at arm's length, meaning Musk sat on both sides of the transaction. The AI division posted a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025 and all 11 original xAI co-founders have since departed. Starlink, the satellite internet service, is the only profitable part of the business, and its profits are currently covering the AI division's losses.
Musk holds 85% of SpaceX's voting power through a structure where his shares carry 10 votes each, while shares sold to the public carry one. Buying SPCX stock does not give you any meaningful say in how the company is run.
The S&P 500, which tracks the 500 largest US companies and has roughly $13 trillion in passive money linked to it, confirmed on June 4 that it will not change its eligibility rules for SpaceX or any other mega IPO. Companies must have 12 months of public trading history and four profitable quarters before the index will consider them. SpaceX does not meet either test. The Nasdaq did change its rules, however, allowing SpaceX to join the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days. If you hold a Nasdaq index fund through a pension, a 401(k), or a savings platform, you may end up owning SpaceX automatically.
Meanwhile, the two pure AI companies are moving fast. Anthropic filed its confidential SEC paperwork on June 1, just days before SpaceX's debut. It closed a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation and is targeting an October listing on the Nasdaq. Its revenue has grown from $4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026 to a projected $10.9 billion in the current quarter, a 130% increase in a single quarter. That would make it the first AI lab to post a quarterly operating profit, at $559 million. Anthropic itself has told investors this profit is temporary: it plans to spend heavily on computing infrastructure in coming quarters, which will push it back into losses. Its longer-term internal targets are $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028.
OpenAI filed its own confidential paperwork on June 8 and was unusually candid about it: "We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it." The company targets a September debut and was last valued privately at $852 billion. It reported $5.7 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2026. Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI does not expect to reach profitability until 2029 or 2030.
The situation for business operators using AI tools is changing. These companies are entering a world of quarterly reporting, public shareholders, and financial scrutiny they have never faced. Pricing decisions, service limits, and product priorities will increasingly be shaped by what public markets want to see every 90 days. That pressure does not disappear after the listings: it compounds. The operators who should pay closest attention are the ones who have built workflows that depend on a single AI provider, because the incentives of that provider are about to shift considerably.