SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI: What if one of the mega AI IPOs fizzles?

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is on the verge of a $US1.75 trillion ($2.4 trillion) sharemarket listing. Anthropic has filed early documents for a $US1 trillion-plus initial public offering. And OpenAI isn’t far behind with its own $US1 trillion-plus float.

There’s never been anything quite like this: three giant start-ups, with combined market valuations approaching or surpassing $US4 trillion, listing on the US market within months of each other.

Excluding SpaceX’s rockets, the oldest of these three AI ventures now being valued at more than $US1 trillion each is just over a decade old. The world’s largest physical retailer, Walmart, founded nearly 64 years ago and earning more than $US22 billion a year, has a market capitalisation of less than US$1 trillion now and IBM, around for nearly 115 years, is worth only about $US300 billion.

None of those AI giants is profitable, with only Anthropic appearing to be on revenue and cost run-rates that put potential profitability on the horizon.

Indeed, as a group, they are racking up multi-billion dollar losses each month. SpaceX lost $US4.3 billion, on $US45.7 billion of revenue, in only the first quarter of this year.

Yet, they have been able to raise vast amounts of capital at ever-increasing valuations from private investors ahead of their floats – Anthropic, valued at $US380 billion in February, raised $US65 billion at a company valuation of $US965 billion this week. And they are expected, between them, to raise the best part of $US200 billion more before the end of the year.

SpaceX will be first cab off the rank, selling about $US75 billion worth of new shares and testing the market’s appetite for capitalising an AI future that’s opaque and impossible to value with conventional methods. At $US1.75 trillion, it would be valued at more than 100 times its revenues.

With Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and other index providers changing their rules to fast-track the AI IPOs’ inclusion immediately into their indices – a process that normally takes three months – there will be a level of forced investment from exchange-traded funds and passive funds that track these indices to help ensure them a smooth transition into the public markets.

Plus, there’s extraordinary hype among institutional and retail investors alike about AI and its eventual commercial potential, with SpaceX’s listing also buoyed by Musk’s personal followers, captured by his success at Tesla and his sci-fi vision of lunar missions, the colonisation of Mars and solar-powered data centres in space.

That’s not a prediction. As long as the US shar