Elon Musk is about to set in motion a chain of events that will reshape the global financial order. For starters, when SpaceX formally goes public next week, he is all but guaranteed to become the world’s first trillionaire. His rocket company is targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion, which would make it one of the 10 biggest companies in the world—bigger than Meta, Walmart, and, for that matter, Tesla.
All of this activity is less about colonizing Mars and more about providing the infrastructure for the AI boom: Musk wants to use his rockets to launch data centers into space, where there is abundant solar power to harvest. His rush to tap into the public markets seems to be pushing the other AI behemoths to do the same. On Monday, Anthropic filed confidential documents to begin the process of going public as early as this fall. And OpenAI is reportedly preparing to do the same any day now.
Anthropic and OpenAI, too, will likely be valued at $1 trillion or more, dwarfing JPMorgan Chase and Exxon Mobil. These will be three of the largest initial public offerings, or IPOs, in history—and all three may hit the stock market in the span of just a few months. It’s hard to overstate the effects this rapid succession of gargantuan IPOs will have on the American economy—think of it as dropping three boulders, one after the other, into a kiddie pool.
These companies are not going public because they are moneymaking machines. Consider that SpaceX, in the lead-up to its IPO, revealed that while it is seeking a nearly $1.8 trillion valuation, the company has lost $4.3 billion in just the first three months of 2026. OpenAI is also unprofitable, while Anthropic might barely post its first profitable quarter ever at the end of June. Yet the trio are set to become among the most valuable companies in the world because of a promise of unprecedented riches on the horizon. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX wrote that in the long run, AI will eat the economy, and so its total revenue could be, in essence, equivalent to most of the U.S. GDP. Similar logic could be applied to OpenAI or Anthropic.
To create such all-powerful bots that could feasibly reshape the entire economy, AI firms have to build lots and lots of data centers. (Hence Musk’s excitement about putting them in space.) Whether in orbit or on Earth, they will be extremely expensive. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said he would like to build a gigawatt of data-center capacity every week—that’s as much power as a major city demands and would likely cost tens of billions of dollars every seven days.
The cost of all this data-center construction is likely why SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are now racing to go public. (None of the companies has addressed this directly themselves, and they did not respond to my requests for comment.) For years, they have all been able to raise enormous sums from private investors. Anthropic’s latest fundraising round valued the company at $965 billion, while OpenAI’s put it at $852 billion. But even these private funds are hitting a limit. AI companies “have essentially extracted all the capital the private markets can really give them,” Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst who specializes in AI at PitchBook, told me. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI need more money, while the venture-capital and private-equity firms that have been propping them up want to finally profit from their major investments.
The upshot is that, before long, you may personally be able to purchase shares of SpaceX, Anthropic, or OpenAI. In fact, these companies may be angling for retail investors, meaning individuals who buy stocks themselves. SpaceX will reportedly reserve up to 30 percent of its shares for these traders, much higher than the typical 5 or 10 percent. Though it’s unclear if Anthropic and OpenAI will do something similar, even in its latest private fundraising round, OpenAI raised more than $3 billion from individual investors—announcing that it was “giving more people the opportunity to share in the upside economics of OpenAI and the AI era.”
More cynically, retail investors are considered, “for lack of a better word, less sophisticated than institutional investors,” Franco Granda, a senior research analyst who covers SpaceX at PitchBook, told me. Everyday people are especially likely to buy a stock if they believe in a vision—putting data centers in space, curing cancer with AI, what have you—irrespective of the underlying financials. And Musk, especially, has an army of eager fanboys. (Faith in Musk’s pitch for Tesla to develop robotaxis and humanoid bots is in no small part why Tesla’s stock has chugged along fine, despite collapsing profits.)
On top of that, many Americans will be forced to purchase shares of SpaceX—and likely Anthropic and OpenAI after that—whether they want to or not, and perhaps without even knowing it. That’s because many Americans passively invest their 401(k) and other retirement savings through index funds—large stock portfolios tied to indexes such as the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100 designed to broadly track the market’s performance by pooling together the stocks of the biggest public companies.
Ordinarily there is a long waiting period before a public company is included in an index, because the months immediately after an IPO can be very volatile. The values of Facebook and Uber fell dramatically after going public due to concerns over their revenues (though their stock prices eventually rebounded and have since risen dramatically); others, most famously Pets.com, have gone out of business. But in the lead-up to the potential windfall from SpaceX, several major indexes (although not the S&P 500) created fast-track exceptions that will allow Musk’s firm to be included within just days of going public. The same rules could expedite the entry of Anthropic and OpenAI, as well. As soon as one of these companies is included in any of the major indexes, millions of Americans will automatically be purchasing its stock—in turn buoying the value of shares held by big institutional investors. You may soon have a personal financial stake in Musk conquering space and ChatGPT curing cancer.
To a large extent, much of the U.S. economy was already tangled up with Silicon Valley: AI-related stocks accounted for nearly 80 percent of gains in the S&P 500 from the launch of ChatGPT through the end of last year, and the nation is spending more to build data centers than on offices or transportation infrastructure. But now the fate of the American financial system will be even more directly exposed to the fate of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
The overall effect on stock markets will be chaotic, not a sure rise. For all of these companies to list at $1 trillion or more, it’s likely that some money will have to come out of other major space and tech stocks—hedge funds and investors could shift their bets from Northrop Grumman to SpaceX, for instance, or from Microsoft to OpenAI, or from SpaceX to Anthropic. In the long run, the best-case scenario is that these companies are financial successes and make many of us prosperous in turn. The worst-case scenario, that the AI boom is a bubble, just got an order of magnitude more severe. And there are some red flags on that front: A recent analysis from Bain found that AI is not yielding substantial savings for corporations, and businesses are growing concerned with the tremendous bills their employees are racking up from running the most advanced versions of Claude and ChatGPT. Uber’s chief operating officer recently said that AI spending is becoming “harder to justify.”
Of course, concerns that AI is a bubble rise and fall every few months. But through it all, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have continued to embed their bots more deeply and broadly across the economy. By weaving itself into the finances of most businesses and households in America, the AI industry is quickly making itself too big to fail. Should these three firms go public, the fallout from an AI bust would spell ruin for the savings of much of the country. Just as the federal government stepped in when banks and automakers went bankrupt in 2008, it could not allow Silicon Valley to collapse. The promise of AI was always a self-fulfilling prophecy: This technology is so expensive to build that it must be world changing; and because it is world changing, we will spend any amount to build it.
