Analysis
SpaceX's historic IPO continues to reshape how investors think about the next wave of mega-cap tech listings. Shares surged more than 37% in the first week after the June 12 debut, pushing the company's valuation above $2.7 trillion and setting record levels of both retail and options trading activity -- evidence that public-market appetite for the biggest private tech names remains genuinely enormous, even if that appetite has proven volatile since (SpaceX has since traded down close to 39% from its post-IPO peak).
That combination of explosive initial demand and subsequent volatility hasn't cooled investor enthusiasm for what comes next. Market participants are increasingly grouping SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI together as a "Magnificent Three" of trillion-dollar-plus AI-adjacent listings, with Fortune's new reporting laying out how retail and institutional investors are positioning to play the next debut in the sequence.
“OpenAI was most recently valued at $852 billion privately and is aiming for a roughly $1 trillion IPO valuation.”
The numbers underline both the scale and the risk. OpenAI was most recently valued at $852 billion privately and is aiming for a roughly $1 trillion IPO valuation. Anthropic, valued at $965 billion after its May Series H-1, would be pricing at approximately 111 times its $9 billion annualized revenue run rate from the end of 2025 if it targets a similar trillion-dollar mark -- though its revenue has grown dramatically since, reportedly reaching a $47 billion run rate by May 2026. Combined, the three companies could pull more than $200 billion in liquidity from public markets, an unprecedented concentration of mega-cap tech debuts within a single calendar stretch.
Market strategists quoted in the Fortune piece are explicit that this isn't a risk-free trade: SpaceX's own volatile round trip -- from IPO price to a 37% pop to a 39% drawdown, all within about six weeks -- is the clearest available evidence that public markets will test these valuations continuously rather than simply extending the private-market enthusiasm that got each company to its pre-IPO mark.
What to watch: whether Anthropic holds its rumored October listing target and how its roadshow narrative addresses the durability of its revenue growth, and whether OpenAI's 2027 timeline shift gives it a longer runway to build a cleaner public-market growth story than either of the other two.
