The AI company filed for a Nasdaq listing on Monday and expects a deal as big as SpaceX’s. SpaceX buyers learned the hard way that the first day is the most expensive way to own a hot IPO.
SpaceX reported its first profit as a public company last week, and Musk's stake is worth hundreds of billions he cannot touch until June 2027. It does not matter. From Zip2 to PayPal to SpaceX, every cash windfall has gone straight into the next build, and this time the build is a chip plant, an AI stack, a robot line and a battery business that somebody has to supply.
Monday's filing starts the clock on what could be the biggest IPO since SpaceX. But Anthropic stock has already changed hands this year at four different prices, every one of them private, and the SpaceX chart shows what the opening bell does to the people who wait for it.
Rockets brought in $1.8 billion of SpaceX’s $14.6 billion quarter and lost money. AI took $16.4 billion of its capital budget. Meanwhile NASA, the Space Force and the Pentagon are spreading contracts across a dozen companies, with SpaceX only one of them.
In the same month Apple launched a $1,999 foldable, regulators cleared SpaceX to put 15,000 phone-connecting satellites in orbit. Only one of those is a bet on what a phone will be in five years.
Energy revenue fell 16% last quarter and the shares dropped anyway. Then Musk said next year's Megapacks are nearly gone and his CFO called data center demand extreme. The business hiding inside the car company has doubled in two years, and its customers are utilities and the AI buildout.