Jessica Mendoza

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Monday, June 15th.

coming up on the show, the great IPO frenzy of 2026.

The hype going into SpaceX's IPO was wild.

Investors seemed excited about the vision that founder Elon Musk has for the company, a future that would see AI data centers in orbit and a human colony on Mars.

By the end of the day Friday, it seemed clear that that excitement had translated into a successful IPO.

Other AI-related IPOs, meaning OpenAI and Anthropic.

Like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic have been raising big money from private investors for a while.

But they plan to turn on the taps even more by going public as soon as this fall.

What's not yet clear is which of the two companies will IPO first.

So is this a race to go public?

Why actively compete with one another?

No matter which company goes to market first, it could change the game for the other one.

In other words, if the company that goes first does well, let's call it company A, it could leave investors feeling confident and set up an even bigger IPO for company B. But if company A doesn't do well, it could make it much harder for company B to make as much money as they want.

At the same time that OpenAI and Anthropic are planning to go public, both companies are also locked in another kind of race.

They both want to have the better AI model to dominate the AI market.

Flaky as in developing and building out the infrastructure for AI costs a lot more than these companies are currently charging customers for the products.

And neither have turned a major profit.

So can these huge companies, you know, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, can they live up to all the hype?