Brothers, let's start with a hot event that just happened—SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history on Nasdaq. On June 12, 2026, it was priced at about $135 per share, raised $75 billion successfully, and reached a total valuation of $1.75 trillion, surpassing Saudi Aramco's record and completely resetting the meaning of a "mega IPO." The market's reception was astonishing, showing that investors are still extremely enthusiastic about frontier technology and future growth themes.
But everyone must remember—enthusiasm does not equal certainty. Large IPOs often open strong, but history suggests that such high-profile companies can see average pullbacks of more than 50% within a year. And SpaceX is still unprofitable, its valuation is lofty, and its governance structure is complex. Some conservative investors have already stayed cautious. In other words, behind the glossy surface there is meaningful risk.
So what comes next? The focus is OpenAI and Anthropic. These two AI giants are lining up for IPOs and have huge valuation potential, possibly close to the trillion-dollar level. But can they list in the fall and explode like SpaceX, draw the same market excitement, and even create similar glory? Today we will deeply analyze the stories behind these two companies, the competitive landscape, and what ordinary investors should do in this AI IPO wave so you can sort out the risks and opportunities.
Let's start with the first key issue: valuation and expectations.
When many people hear that OpenAI and Anthropic are going public, their first reaction is: isn't this just the next SpaceX? If SpaceX can be this hot, shouldn't OpenAI and Anthropic be even hotter? After all, the hottest keyword in the world right now is AI.
But we need to stay calm, because the valuation logic for SpaceX versus OpenAI and Anthropic is very different.
SpaceX has a very high valuation and plenty of debate, but at least part of it is backed by visible real business. For example, rocket launches have government contracts, NASA projects, and commercial launch orders. Starlink is not just a PowerPoint story; it is already a satellite internet business with a global network, paying subscribers, and real revenue. In other words, part of SpaceX's valuation comes from future imagination, and part comes from real assets.
It is like buying a company that is expensive, but you can at least see factories, orders, customers, and cash flow. You may still argue whether it is too expensive, but it is not something built entirely on a single sentence like "the future will be great."
But OpenAI and Anthropic are different.
They are both strong, and their technology has already changed how many people work. OpenAI has ChatGPT, enterprise customers, and Microsoft ecosystem support. Anthropic has Claude, a safety and compliance approach, and it is increasingly popular with enterprise users. But the valuations they are being discussed at are mostly buying the future: that model capabilities will keep improving, that enterprise AI penetration will keep rising, and that AI will become the infrastructure of every company over the next decade.
That means their valuations rely more on market confidence than on free cash flow that is already stable and being released today.
To put it more bluntly, SpaceX is "real business plus future imagination," while OpenAI and Anthropic are more like "tech narrative plus future expectation." Both can be very valuable, but their risk resilience is completely different.
Once the market mood is good and investors are willing to believe in the future, OpenAI and Anthropic can be valued extremely high. The market will say AI is the next internet, OpenAI is the gateway, and Anthropic is the core player in enterprise-safe AI, so paying a bit more is fine.
But once sentiment changes, rates rise, liquidity tightens, or people start asking one simple question—when do these companies actually make money?—valuation pressure appears immediately.
That is the biggest difference between AI companies and traditional software companies.
In traditional software, once a product is built, the marginal cost of adding a new customer is usually low. Large-model companies are not like that. Every user query, every enterprise API call, every training run and inference run carries real cash cost. GPUs cost money, power costs money, data centers cost money, engineers cost money, and cloud services cost money.
So the problem for OpenAI and Anthropic is not just user growth. It is a much harsher issue: the more users they have, the higher the revenue, but the costs may also rise at the same time.
It is like a restaurant that is incredibly popular, with a line out the door every day. Sounds amazing, right? But if every meal sold comes with absurdly high ingredient, labor, and rent costs, the restaurant may not actually make money in the end. It may look hot and have great revenue, but when you open the income statement, you find the profit has all been eaten by costs.
OpenAI's biggest problem is exactly here. It is one of the industry's most influential companies: large user scale, strong brand, leading technology, and deep integration with Microsoft. But its cash burn is also huge. Over the next few years, OpenAI may still need to keep investing capital to train larger models, build stronger compute systems, and maintain its product lead.
This is not small money; it is ongoing capital consumption.
Anthropic is a bit different. It is not as aggressive as OpenAI; its approach is steadier and emphasizes safety, compliance, and enterprise reliability. That is very attractive in the U.S. enterprise market, because many large companies do not just want a smart AI; they want an AI that is controllable, trustworthy, and not reckless.
That is also a key reason Anthropic has risen so quickly.
But Anthropic is not without risk either. It relies heavily on the Claude product family and has a narrower product line than OpenAI. It also needs a lot of capital to expand compute, train models, and compete for enterprise customers. As long as AI model competition keeps escalating, it will be hard for Anthropic to slow down and save money.
So the biggest issue for these two companies is not whether they have a future. Of course they do. The real question is what price the market will be willing to pay for that future when they list in the fall.
If they go public at valuations close to a trillion dollars, investors are not buying an ordinary growth stock; they are buying a very expensive ticket to the future. Whether that ticket is worth it depends on three things.
First, will enterprise customers keep paying?
Second, can AI inference and training costs come down?
Third, can they move from "growing fast" to "actually making money"?
If even one of those three misses, the stock could swing violently.
So we cannot simply say that OpenAI and Anthropic will definitely copy SpaceX's glory. They may well get huge attention at the time of listing and be chased by capital because the AI narrative is so powerful. But from an investing perspective, their underlying support is not the same as SpaceX's.
SpaceX at least has Starlink, rocket business, and government contracts as real anchors. OpenAI and Anthropic are anchored more by technological leadership, ecosystem lock-in, and future growth expectations. Those anchors are attractive, but they are also more easily influenced by market sentiment.
Especially when investors move from "I want to buy the future" to "I need to see cash flow," these two companies will face a real test.
So let's remember one core conclusion: a strong tech market does not mean every IPO will be strong. And a great company does not mean the listing price is cheap. OpenAI and Anthropic may be among the most important AI companies of the future, but if they list at overly high valuations, ordinary investors can still end up buying at the hottest and riskiest point.
In other words, these companies are not unbuyable—but do not buy just because they are called OpenAI and Anthropic.
Smart investors do not just ask whether they are good companies. They ask how much of the future has already been spent in today's price.
Next, let's talk about the second key point: first-mover advantage and latecomer disadvantage.
In the IPO market, there is a very real rule: the first company out the gate often gets the richer premium. Why? Because investor enthusiasm is not infinite, and neither is the money in the market. Especially for a super-tech IPO, the first company on stage gets the strongest emotions, the freshest story, and the most willing capital.
SpaceX is the first main character in this wave.
Once it listed, it grabbed the market's full attention. Whether you like Musk or not, and whether you think SpaceX is expensive or not, it did one thing successfully: it reignited the story of "future-tech IPOs." Rockets, Starlink, space internet, and AI compute were all bundled together. Capital markets love this kind of story because it has imagination and strong media power.
Now OpenAI and Anthropic face a very practical question: who can become the first true star in the AI IPO wave?
According to current market discussion, Anthropic may list before OpenAI. The reason is simple: Anthropic's listing pace looks more aggressive, and some investors believe its secondary-market valuation already gives it a solid pricing base. If Anthropic gets to market first in the fall, it may capture the so-called first-mover premium.
What does that mean?
Think of it as the queue effect for a new restaurant opening. When the first place opens, everyone wants to try it, media report on it, investors discuss it, and institutions are willing to assign it a higher valuation. But once a second or third similar place opens, the market becomes more picky. People stop asking only whether the story sounds good and start asking what is actually better than the one before: faster growth, lower losses, stickier customers, and more reasonable valuation?
That is the pressure OpenAI may face.
OpenAI certainly has the stronger brand. ChatGPT has almost become the entry point through which ordinary people understand AI. Many people's first real contact with generative AI was not Claude and not Gemini, but ChatGPT. So in terms of name recognition and user mindshare, OpenAI is still the strongest.
But capital markets do not just look at fame. They also look at the IPO window, market sentiment, and whether valuation is already full.
If Anthropic goes public first and performs well, it may take away some capital and attention that would otherwise have gone to OpenAI. Many fund managers may think: I already own Anthropic and already have exposure to the AI model company, so when OpenAI comes out, do I really want to chase it again at an even higher price? That is a very practical question.
Especially in a high-rate, high-valuation, high-volatility environment, institutional money does not spray blindly. It compares, filters, and asks which company has the clearer path to profitability.
That is why Anthropic, if it lists first, could have a subtle advantage. Its story is less consumer-familiar than OpenAI's, but it is easier to package as an enterprise-grade, safety-compliant, stable AI company. For large U.S. enterprise customers, especially in finance, legal, healthcare, and government-related sectors, that story is very attractive. Those customers do not necessarily want the most conversational AI; they want reliable, controllable, compliant AI that does not go off the rails.
So Anthropic's edge is not the biggest volume; it is that it looks more like an AI vendor a company would actually want to put into its enterprise systems.
OpenAI uses a different playbook. It is more of an attacking player: stronger brand, more consumer-facing product, hotter developer ecosystem, faster growth. But its problem is that expectations are too high. The higher the expectations, the harder the IPO pricing. Investors will naturally feel that OpenAI should be the king of AI, and kings should have king-level valuations. But once the valuation is too high, any slight disappointment in the future gets magnified by the market.
That is the awkwardness of latecomers.
The more famous you are, the more the market expects perfection. The more bullish it is, the easier it is for pricing to get fully stretched. By the time you actually list, much of the good news may already be in the price.
That is also why some IPOs have a beautiful first jump but are much harder to trade on the second and third. It is not because the later companies are bad; it is because the market has already been educated once, capital has already bought a round, and the emotion is no longer fresh.
There was a similar pattern during the internet bubble. The first batch of star tech IPOs was bought aggressively. But as more and more companies lined up, investors realized the stories were similar while valuations kept getting more expensive. Eventually, the market went from excitement to doubt and from doubt to retreat very quickly.
So back to OpenAI and Anthropic.
If Anthropic lists first and performs strongly, it does have a chance to capture some of SpaceX's spotlight. It could become the benchmark for public AI model companies and give the market a new pricing reference. Then investors will say that even safety-first AI can command this kind of valuation, and enterprise AI is really this popular.
But that is not necessarily good news for OpenAI.
The better Anthropic performs, the higher the valuation expectations for OpenAI may become, and the higher the listing threshold. The market will compare the two companies: whose revenue is growing faster, who burns less cash, whose customers are stickier, whose compute costs are more controllable, who is more tightly tied to cloud giants, and whose profitability path is clearer.
If OpenAI delays its listing and lets Anthropic absorb the first wave of capital and attention, the market may become more demanding when OpenAI finally appears. Investors will not buy it just because it is called OpenAI; they will start doing the math.
Of course, the reverse is also true.
If Anthropic lists first but performs poorly, OpenAI will also be affected. The market may treat Anthropic as the AI IPO canary. If Anthropic breaks issue price or falls sharply after listing, investors will immediately worry: will OpenAI do the same? Are AI model companies all too expensive? Is compute cost uncontrollable? Are enterprise customers slower to pay than expected?
So Anthropic's listing result may become a wind vane for OpenAI.
It is like a relay race: if the first runner performs well, the next runner has more confidence. But if the first runner falls, even a stronger runner behind them gets an early question mark from the market.
That is the essence of first-mover advantage and latecomer disadvantage.
For Anthropic, listing first could mean grabbing the window, the money, and the valuation benchmark. For OpenAI, listing later could mean a stronger brand but also greater pricing pressure.
So we should not just ask who is greater. We should ask who can use a better timing, a more reasonable valuation, and a more market-friendly profit story.
That is the key point of the fall AI IPO season.
Next, let's discuss the third key point: passive capital and rule changes.
This sounds technical and like an internal Wall Street rule that ordinary investors do not need to care about. But I am telling you, this is exactly the most important and most easily ignored part of this AI IPO wave.
Because the most powerful thing about SpaceX's IPO was not just the high valuation or the hot market mood; it exposed a hidden capital channel. As long as a company is big enough, hot enough, and aligned with index rules, huge amounts of passive capital will automatically flow in.
What is passive capital? Simply put, index funds, ETFs, pensions, and 401(k) retirement accounts. They do not have fund managers sitting there saying, I like SpaceX today and OpenAI tomorrow. That is not how it works. Their rule is simple: if it is in the index, I buy it. If its weight is X, I buy X percent.
So what happens if the rules change and a company can enter the index faster? It can get the passive-buyer demand sooner. The answer is yes.
That is the first lesson SpaceX's IPO gave the market. Wall Street changed Nasdaq's fast-entry rule to allow a newly listed giant to be included in major indexes sooner. For the company, that is obviously good, because before it has even gone through a long public-market test, it can already receive a batch of buyers that are almost guaranteed to arrive.
Who are these buyers? Not random retail traders and not short-term speculators, but giant index-fund and retirement-account systems.
That matters a lot.
For OpenAI and Anthropic, if they can enjoy similar rule benefits when they list in the fall, their stocks could get a very strong short-term boost. The market will anticipate that index funds will buy later, ETFs will buy later, and pension accounts will eventually be forced to allocate. So active capital may rush in ahead of time, creating a front-running trade.
Think of it like concert tickets. If everyone knows a huge crowd must come in later and buy, the people at the front will rush in early to secure positions. The result is higher short-term ticket prices, stronger hype, and hotter sentiment.
From that angle, rule changes are positive for OpenAI and Anthropic. They improve the stock's initial absorption capacity and make it easier for the market to tell a story: this is not an ordinary IPO; this is the global passive-capital repricing of future AI core assets.
But the other side is just as important.
Passive capital is both a force and a risk. It can push the stock up, and it can also make the stock more fragile.
Why? Because passive buying does not mean the company has actually proven profitability. An index fund buys not because it studied OpenAI's cash flow carefully, and not because it believes Anthropic's model training costs will definitely fall. It buys because the rules tell it to.
It is like a student being pushed onto the stage to accept an award because the school requires it. The applause is huge, the spotlight is bright, and it looks glorious. But the real question is whether the grades that come after can keep up. If the grades do not keep up, the audience's mood can shift from excitement to doubt very quickly.
OpenAI and Anthropic are the same.
If, after listing, revenue keeps growing faster than expected, enterprise customers keep paying, compute costs gradually decline, and the path to free cash flow becomes clearer and clearer, then the first wave of gains driven by passive capital may become the starting point of a longer-term trend.
But if after listing the market finds that revenue is growing fast yet losses are also huge, capex keeps rising, model training keeps getting more expensive, and customers are not as willing to pay as expected, then the price lifted by the rules will become later pressure on the stock.
That is the double-edged sword.
Rules can create liquidity, but they cannot create profit. Rules can bring in buyers, but they cannot prove a business model. Rules can make an IPO more exciting, but they cannot guarantee investors will make money in the end.
Many large tech IPOs have had this pattern. Right after listing, the story sounds wonderful, the market is wildly excited, the media reports it every day, retail investors talk about it constantly, and institutions are willing to pay high valuations. But a year later, people calm down and start looking at revenue, profit, cash flow, and competition. The stock gets repriced. The higher it went before, the harder it may fall afterward.
So can OpenAI and Anthropic copy SpaceX's first wave of glory? The answer is yes, possibly—especially if the rules, market mood, and AI narrative all line up, they can absolutely attract very strong capital support right after listing.
But whether they can copy SpaceX's sustained glory is a completely different matter.
Short term: watch the rules. Medium term: watch earnings. Long term: watch cash flow.
That sentence is very important.
In the short term, fast-entry rules, expected index inclusion, and passive capital chasing can send OpenAI and Anthropic very high.
In the medium term, the market will ask whether revenue keeps growing quickly, whether enterprise customers stay sticky, and whether partnerships with cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google remain healthy.
In the long term, the market always comes back to the most basic question: can this company really generate free cash flow?
So for investors, never mistake passive buying for a safety net. It is not a safety net. It is more like a wind. When the wind blows, the ship can move faster. But if the ship itself is not stable enough, the stronger the wind, the faster it can capsize.
When OpenAI and Anthropic list in the fall, what matters most is not how much they rise on day one, but whether the market still believes their profit stories after the first wave of enthusiasm passes.
If day one jumps sharply, do not just enjoy the spectacle. You need to ask why it rose. Was it because enterprise orders beat expectations, the business model is clearer, and the cash-flow path is sturdier? Or was it because index-fund expectations and market emotion temporarily pushed the price up?
Those two kinds of rallies mean very different things.
The first is fundamentals-driven. The second is liquidity-driven.
Fundamentals-driven rallies can go much farther. Liquidity-driven rallies can reverse very quickly when sentiment flips.
So my view is that fast-entry rules can help OpenAI and Anthropic get a prettier start, but they will not solve the core problem. AI companies are still fundamentally fighting three things: whether customers are willing to keep paying, whether compute costs can be reduced, and whether revenue growth can be converted into real profit.
That is also what ordinary investors should remember most.
Do not think you must buy immediately just because index funds will buy. And do not think the first-day jump guarantees a steady climb afterward. Wall Street is very good at packaging liquidity as certainty and short-term heat as long-term faith.
But investing's biggest trap is forgetting to ask, when everyone else is most excited, whether this price is actually worth it.
Now let's look at the broader market environment. No matter how hot SpaceX's IPO is, it is only the beginning of the 2026 IPO market and does not represent the entire market. AI-related stocks are indeed very popular, but if you look carefully, stocks in other sectors are not doing well at the same time. That means capital may be concentrating in just a few companies while the overall market remains unhealthy.
For OpenAI and Anthropic, that creates two possible scenarios. First, if the economic environment is stable, rates are reasonable, and money keeps flowing into AI technology, they could absolutely look strong right after listing. Second, if the macro environment worsens—for example, rates rise, liquidity tightens, or AI profit expectations break down—their IPOs may not achieve the symbolic success SpaceX did.
In other words, copying SpaceX's IPO is only part of the market expectation. The real challenge is whether these two companies can keep their stock prices supported in a high-valuation, high-inflow environment and truly deliver earnings and cash flow.
To summarize:
OpenAI and Anthropic certainly have the ability to attract huge attention. They may become the largest AI IPOs in history, and the market has already bet on their technology leadership and growth potential. But fully copying SpaceX's current glory is very difficult. The reasons are simple: AI company profitability is still unstable and cash flow has not yet been fully realized; valuation depends more on future imagination than on current results; the order of first mover and latecomer affects the capital premium; and passive buying does not solve the long-term profit problem.
So yes, they may perform well right after listing, but they are unlikely to create SpaceX-level mythology immediately.
Finally, here is my investment reminder: in high-expectation IPOs like these, short-term enthusiasm and long-term value may have nothing to do with each other. Do not just watch the first-day gain; focus on the company's profit path, cash flow, and real business execution.
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