The €3trn question: Can markets handle SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all at once?
Three of the most valuable companies ever created are going public within months of each other. The combined value of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic could reach $4 trillion (€3.44trn). Wall Street is excited but also nervous.
In the history of financial markets, there has never been anything quite like what is about to happen in 2026.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, three private giants with a combined estimated valuation approaching $4 trillion (€3.44trn), are all preparing to debut on public markets within the space of a few months.
The sheer scale of the exercise dwarfs anything that has come before it, and it raises a question that bankers, fund managers and ordinary investors are now asking with growing urgency: does the stock market have the capacity to absorb all three?
The answer, at least for now, appears to be yes, though with notable caveats and with the likelihood of a difficult digestion period ahead.
SpaceX goes first and goes big
The first of the three to test the public markets will be SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite firm, which is targeting a Nasdaq debut under the ticker "SPCX" this Friday.
In February, the company acquired xAI, another of Musk's firms, in an all-stock transaction that valued SpaceX at $1trn (€842bn) and xAI at $250bn (€210bn), creating an entity with a reported $1.25trn (€1.05trn) valuation at the time and adding AI exposure to the SpaceX portfolio.
According to a filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last Wednesday, the company has set a fixed price of $135 per share, targeting a raise of $75 billion (€64.5bn) at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion (€1.5trn).
The mechanics of that pricing decision alone are remarkable. Companies preparing to list publicly typically set a price range, allowing investor demand to guide the final figure.
SpaceX has dispensed with that convention entirely, publishing a fixed price before its roadshow has even begun. According to multiple reports, investors familiar with the deal described the offering as unlike any prior IPO process, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it is targeting a record raise.
Goldman Sachs is leading the offering, alongside Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.
If SpaceX raises $75 billion (€64.5bn) as planned, it will comfortably surpass the current record for capital raised through an IPO, which is held by Saudi Aramco. The Saudi state oil giant raised $29.4 billion (€25.3bn) when it floated in Riyadh in 2019 and later in 2020 when the company exercised its over-allotment option to sell additional shares.
The SpaceX IPO is arriving with such force that financial markets are already reshaping themselves in anticipation.
Index providers are revising the rules for benchmark entry with the Nasdaq-100 and the FTSE Russell lowering the amount of required trading days to start passively accumulating shares from several months to the first week.
Last Thursday, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that "there will be no changes to existing methodology for this index family," clarifying that it will not follow suit and instead safeguard investors.
Passive investment firms are running models on the automatic buying flows that its inclusion will trigger, ETF issuers are scrambling to launch products around the listing and banks have lowered the capital requirements for clients to invest.
For instance, Fidelity lowered the minimum account requirement for the IPO from as high as $500,000 (€430,500) to just $2,000 (€1,700).
Elon Musk is also reportedly seeking to reserve as much as 30% of the shares for retail investors from the outset, allowing unprecedentedly broad access. In large-cap IPOs, retail buyers have historically only received 5 to 10% of the shares on offer.
SpaceX describes retail investor participation as a priority, directing prospective buyers to a list of brokerages, among them SoFi, Robinhood, E*Trade, Schwab and Fidelity.
Musk is seeking to pool liquidity from every available source as SpaceX also added a risk disclosure warning that retail participation could drive volatile trading.
OpenAI and Anthropic line up behind
Waiting in the wings are Anthropic and OpenAI, the two dominant players in the race to build next-generation AI models.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI systems, filed confidentially with the SEC last Monday, just days after closing a $65 billion (€56bn) Series H funding round at a post-money valuation of $965 billion (€831bn), according to the company.
The round pushed Anthropic's private valuation past OpenAI's for the first time.
Bankers are reportedly anchoring Anthropic's public debut valuation near $1 trillion (€861bn), supported in part by a revenue run rate of around $47 billion (€40.4bn) as of May, up sharply from roughly $10 billion (€8.6bn) the previous year, according to the firm.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and one of the world's leading AI developers, filed confidentially in late May 2026, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising.
The company raised $122 billion (€105bn) at an $852 billion (€733.7bn) private valuation in March 2026, according to several reports.
Analysts suggest OpenAI is targeting a public valuation between that figure and $1 trillion (€861bn), with a listing window as early as September and a planned raise of at least $60 billion (€51.6bn).
Together, SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to add as much as $4 trillion (€3.44trn) in value to the market over a few months, with an aggregate fundraise that could exceed $200 billion (€172.2bn), according to Goldman Sachs projections.
A market test without precedent?
To put the numbers into perspective, Goldman Sachs previously projected that the entire US IPO market could raise around $160 billion (€137.7bn) across the whole of 2026.
The three listings together, if completed near their targets, would surpass that figure on their own.
From 2016 to 2025, the total US IPO market raised around $469 billion (€403.8bn) combined, according to data published by Renaissance Capital, a research firm specialising in IPOs.
These three companies, in a matter of months, are asking for nearly half of that.
However, there is an important technical detail that eases the immediate pressure on markets.
Stock index providers, including Nasdaq and FTSE Russell, weight newly listed companies not by their total valuation but by their "free float", meaning only the shares actually released for public trading.
SpaceX, for example, will initially release around 4% of its total equity, meaning its early weight in benchmarks will be a fraction of 1%. Passive funds tracking those indices will therefore not be forced to make large purchases immediately.
That view is shared by Citi. In a note to investors last week, analyst JP Coviello wrote that the wave of mega-IPOs "looks large by historical standards, yet we believe the market can absorb it," adding that "initial index weights are likely to be modest and then scale up only gradually."
Morgan Stanley, which is co-advising on the OpenAI listing, takes a similarly constructive view of the broader market backdrop.
Eddie Molloy, the bank's Global Co-Head of Equity Capital Markets, described the current environment as one where "IPO activity builds across many sectors, driven by investor focus on long-term secular themes," pointing specifically to AI infrastructure buildout and aerospace and space technologies as the two forces reshaping the pipeline.
Lock-up agreements will extend this dynamic further. Most insider stakes in SpaceX cannot be sold for at least a year, and similar provisions are expected to apply to Anthropic and OpenAI.
The full weight of these listings on public markets will therefore unfold over years rather than weeks, providing some insulation against the kind of sudden liquidity shock that has been the subject of concern.
Justifying trillion dollar valuations
What remains an open question is whether the valuations being sought can be justified by the underlying businesses.
None of the three companies is profitable in conventional terms. OpenAI's internal projections point to losses of $14 billion (€12bn) in 2026 alone, while Anthropic is projecting a second-quarter operating margin of around 5%, thin for a company seeking a valuation near $1 trillion (€861bn).
Studies which tracked IPO performance from 1980 to 2024 have found that companies valued at over 40 times their revenue underperformed broader markets over the following three years.
SpaceX, at its proposed $1.75 trillion (€1.5trn) valuation, would begin trading at more than ninety times its 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion (€16.1bn), as disclosed in its SEC filing.
The counterargument to the sceptics rests on something harder to quantify, which is the possibility that AI adoption genuinely transforms productivity in a way that rewrites conventional valuation frameworks.
The OECD, in its Economic Outlook published this month, points to AI-related trade as one of the primary supports for global growth in 2025, noting that strong AI-related trade volumes contributed to merchandise trade rising by 5% last year, with particularly pronounced effects across Asian economies.
The organisation also identifies AI investment as one of the main upside risks to global growth projections, noting that "the effect on economic growth could be compounded if such spending were to translate into a sustained improvement in aggregate productivity."
The OECD further notes that investor confidence in productivity gains from AI has helped maintain favourable market valuations and credit conditions even as geopolitical tensions have weighed on sentiment.
That is a significant institutional endorsement of the underlying thesis behind these valuations, even if the OECD is careful to acknowledge that "the extent and timing of productivity gains related to the adoption of AI is highly uncertain."
Nonetheless, some analysts and fund managers have become dissenting voices regarding SpaceX's current valuation targets. For instance, the investment research firm Morningstar values SpaceX at less than half the $1.75 trillion (€1.5trn) market cap it's looking for in its IPO.
"We think long-term investors eager to participate in SpaceX’s future endeavors and potential success will have opportunities to do so with a greater margin of safety than the initial offering is likely to provide," a company note read.
The AI trade is not yet proven. It is, however, credible enough that some of the world's largest corporations, including Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, each of which participated in OpenAI's March funding round, have already placed enormous bets on it.
What is clear is that the coming months will represent one of the most consequential stress tests that public equity markets have ever faced. If SpaceX's debut stumbles, it may not simply affect the company's own shareholders.
AI-related firms already account for around two-fifths of the S&P 500's total value, according to market data.
A poor debut from any of the three IPOs would inevitably invite a wider conversation about whether AI valuations across the board have run ahead of the evidence.
