Wall Street stands on the edge of one of the largest experiments in market history. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX prepare to list shares. Their combined valuations flirt with $4 trillion. Yet fresh analysis from Apollo Global Management’s chief economist Torsten Sløk urges caution. A chart he produced shows why investors might hesitate before piling in.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1. It had just closed a $65 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion. Reuters reported the move alongside OpenAI’s own filing a week later. OpenAI aims for a $1 trillion valuation and could list as soon as September. SpaceX, already public in recent weeks at a $1.75 trillion mark, trades 18 percent below its $135 offering price six weeks after debut.
But. The hype feels familiar. And dangerous.
Sløk’s research examines IPO performance since 2019. He points to three forces that crushed many new listings: peak valuations, a hostile interest-rate environment, and benchmark returns dominated by a handful of mega-cap winners. “The boom pushed marginal companies public before they were ready while the market-adjusted benchmark was set against an index carried by a handful of mega-cap winners,” Sløk told Business Insider in its July 23 report on the chart. “Each of these forces could persist. Valuations may re-inflate in the next IPO window, rates look set to stay structurally higher than the 2010s and index returns remain concentrated in a few mega-caps that keep the relative bar high.”
Short sentences capture the risk. Long ones reveal the setup. Private markets showered these AI firms with capital under loose conditions. Zero rates and eager retail investors fueled 2020 and 2021. Now higher borrowing costs linger. Mega-caps like Nvidia and Microsoft carry the indexes. New public companies must beat that standard every quarter. Most don’t.
The IPO Race Accelerates Amid Staggering Numbers
OpenAI reported $2 billion in monthly revenue as of mid-2026. It boasts 900 million weekly users and 50 million paid subscribers. Growth runs four times faster than peers at Meta and Alphabet. Still the company does not expect profits until 2030. It raised $110 billion earlier at an $840 billion valuation from backers including SoftBank, Amazon and Nvidia. A March update showed $122 billion raised at $852 billion, per CNN Business.
Anthropic sits close behind. Its annualized revenue run rate reached $47 billion. The firm behind Claude models secured that $965 billion valuation in May. Both companies raced to file confidentially with the SEC. The Wall Street Journal noted the stakes. Technology will decide the ultimate winner in AI. Yet the first to list gains real advantages. A receptive market greeted recent debuts. Cerebras shares jumped 68 percent on day one. Figma’s offering delivered a 250 percent rise, the largest for any deal above $10 billion in five years according to FactSet data cited by the Journal.
So who benefits from speed? The company that taps public capital first can fund massive compute needs without further dilution at sky-high private prices. It also faces immediate pressure. Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, told CNN, “Expectations that seem manageable in private markets can become relentless under the glare of public ownership.” Quarterly results replace vague promises. Growth must stay explosive. Broadcom delivered 48 percent revenue growth in its second quarter yet its shares fell 13 percent. Nvidia once shed $600 billion in market value in a single day in January 2025. Public markets forgive less.
Recent chatter on X underscores the tension. One July 23 post from an AI news account claimed private investors float a full $1 trillion valuation for Anthropic as it nears its debut. Another warned that SpaceX’s post-IPO drop of nearly 45 percent from highs signals trouble ahead for the AI trio. These conversations reflect real investor nerves even as excitement builds.
Legal hurdles cleared at the right time. OpenAI’s nonprofit origins created complications. Elon Musk sued after the 2023 board drama. A jury ruled against him in May 2026. That decision removed a major obstacle to its public plans. SpaceX, which houses Elon Musk’s xAI efforts, completed its own listing process. The trio now offers the clearest test yet of AI’s commercial reality.
Jay Ritter, a longtime IPO scholar, reviewed the data. History suggested SpaceX would lag. It did. His call proved accurate within weeks. Sløk’s chart extends that lesson to the current wave. Marginal companies went public too soon in the last boom. Benchmarks set by seven or eight dominant names made relative performance miserable. Those conditions haven’t vanished. Rates stay elevated. Concentration persists. Valuations sit at extremes.
Investors salivate anyway. The prospect of owning shares in the firms powering ChatGPT, Claude and Starlink proves magnetic. Enterprise partnerships multiply. Revenue climbs fast. Yet profitability timelines stretch years into the future. Compute costs soar. Competition intensifies. The public lens will expose every miss.
Recent coverage reinforces the mixed signals. A TechCrunch article from June 8 detailed OpenAI’s blog post announcement and the tight timeline with Anthropic. Zacks Investment Research published an IPO guide on June 16 that projected a second-half debut for Anthropic, possibly in fall. BBC coverage on June 9 framed the moves as a direct race between the two AI leaders.
Analysts debate the bubble question. Some see sustainable demand from businesses adopting AI tools at scale. Others recall past manias. The 1999 internet rush delivered spectacular winners and even more spectacular losers. Today’s AI leaders possess real products and customers. Their burn rates and capital demands still dwarf most predecessors.
Quarterly discipline arrives soon. Boards that once approved long-term bets must now explain misses to activist investors and index funds. Compensation packages tied to stock performance will swing wildly. Talent retention, already tough, grows more complex when shares gyrate.
The market window remains open for now. Recent large tech listings performed well initially. That optimism may not survive first earnings reports that fail to match private-market narratives. Sløk’s warning lands at the perfect moment. His chart doesn’t predict doom. It simply shows patterns. Patterns that rhyme with today’s setup.
SpaceX already demonstrates the gap. Its post-listing decline came faster than many expected. Anthropic and OpenAI carry even richer price tags relative to current revenue. The bar sits extraordinarily high. Mega-cap performance must falter for these new entrants to shine on a relative basis. Few expect that outcome soon.
Still the listings will proceed. Billions in shares will change hands. Fortunes will be made and lost. Public investors finally gain direct access to the companies at the center of the AI surge. They also inherit the full volatility that private backers avoided for years.
Watch the first reports. Track margin trends. Monitor customer acquisition costs. Those metrics will decide whether the trillion-dollar bets prove visionary or simply late-cycle excess. The data arrives soon enough. Markets rarely wait for perfection.
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