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Chapter 1: What are the biggest IPOs of 2026?
This year, Wall Street is going to see three of the biggest IPOs of all time. SpaceX broke records on Friday. A huge headline today, the biggest IPO in history. At the closing bell, SpaceX is now worth over $2 trillion. That's with a T. And Anthropic and OpenAI are both set to go public at enormous valuations later this year.
Open AI filing to go public about a week after its biggest competitor, Anthropic, did the same thing. Anthropic, the AI company behind Quad, has filed to go public, setting it up to be one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.
Open AI has filed to go public in a blockbuster IPO that could value the chat GPT creator at more than $1 trillion.
By some measures, this is the biggest year ever for IPOs.
Our colleague Spencer Jacob writes an investing column.
As a matter of fact, just the one for SpaceX exceeds basically all of the IPOs that happened during the year 2000, just to give you some perspective. So it's a lot of money being raised.
Why is it happening now? What's in the water in 2026?
Well, what's happening is that we've reached or maybe even passed peak excitement over AI.
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Chapter 2: How did SpaceX achieve its record IPO valuation?
A lot of real money is being sunk into this technology and a lot of hope is riding on it. I mean, you want to raise as much money as you can when people are willing to pay you a lot of money for something.
And how unusual is it to see so many huge IPOs all in one year?
It's something that we've never seen before. I mean, if you look at SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, assuming all three of those happened this year, plus there are some others, it's going to be a record year in terms of dollars raised. It exceeds anything that we've seen before.
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.
I just bought 50 shares of SpaceX at 172 per share and I'm never selling. I would not bet against an E line when it comes to SpaceX.
I'm buying $5,000 worth of shares and we're along for the ride.
I would put my money in one place and one place only. That is Elon Musk and the SpaceX play.
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Chapter 3: What are the anticipated valuations for Anthropic and OpenAI?
This is it.
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.
In terms of its debut, the IPO did live up to the hype. It is the largest IPO ever. It traded up. The company was, at various points of the day, worth more than $2 trillion. It has moved between being the sixth or seventh most valuable company in the United States or seventh or eighth in the world. And so far, it gets an A or an A+. I mean, the stock traded higher.
So the good reception for SpaceX bodes well so far for those other AI-related IPOs.
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?
It is sort of a race, yeah, because you want to be the one who kind of strikes while the iron is hot, raises the most amount of money or gets the highest valuation, and therefore you have the largest war chest or the most cheaply acquired war chest.
No matter which company goes to market first, it could change the game for the other one.
People tend to look at recent examples. If you have a recent example of a company that's done very well and made you a lot of money, then that sort of adds fuel to the fire. You have a validation that the next thing is going to do well. And then if it winds up doing very poorly, then it could kind of poison the well for those future ones.
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Chapter 4: Why is 2026 considered a peak year for tech IPOs?
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.
That's the sort of the basic equation that they're facing. And so that's why they've chosen this moment really to do it because it's not because these companies are all profitable. They're not all profitable. It's because the excitement level is very high. You know, you wait two, three years. Oh, let's just wait and see how well it does. Well, you know, the moment very well could have passed.
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.
As excited as people are about AI, the products really have to be good. And they are good. I mean, we all used either ChatGPT or Claude or both of them. We've used them and we've kind of been blown away by the things that they can do and how quickly they've advanced, too.
It's just in a pretty short amount of time, it's like they went from being in kindergarten to being, you know, like sophomores in high school, right?
Yeah.
It is pretty cool what they can do, but the products kind of have to sell themselves and the business plans have to sell themselves. And they're kind of flaky business plans. Let's be honest.
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.
When the dust settles, if you're going to believe all the commitments that have been made, trillions of dollars will have been invested in it. That's more than the internet. That's more than railroads. It's more than any other big infrastructure.
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Chapter 5: What factors are driving the current IPO frenzy?
It's more than the Apollo project to reach the moon. We're getting close to it being as much as like World War II, defeating fascism, right? So it's that kind of level of investment.
So can these huge companies, you know, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, can they live up to all the hype? Like, can they make a solid profit off of that kind of investment?
You know, you're betting on these companies growing their sales at a pace that no company has ever done. Is it possible? Of course it is. You know, things change and this is a new technology. But, you know, the chances of that happening are not a slam dunk by any stretch of the imagination.
What these companies are pitching is that these technologies will be incredibly profitable in the long term, because over time, the tech will get better, and so the cost of running it will go down. And Spencer says a lot of retail investors seem to be buying into that idea.
The reason that people are excited about it is because they see it as the next big thing. They read stories about people who bought into the Apple IPO, the Microsoft IPO in the 1980s, the Amazon IPO in the 1990s. And even though those were pretty rocky, there were ups and downs. There were mostly ups. You know, you got really, really rich eventually if you hung on.
And, you know, FOMO is the term for it, if you're missing out.
— Of missing the boat.
— Missing the boat, exactly. Just of missing out on some great thing.
— All the money flowing into these companies have meant that Anthropic and OpenAI will likely have valuations around a trillion dollars or more. And Spencer says that could put pressure on an already overhyped market. That's next. SpaceX, and eventually Anthropic and OpenAI, will be adding a ton of market cap into the technology space. And these IPOs are coming at a time when the U.S.
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