For SpaceX (and possible the others):

Yes it can, since they changed the rules to force over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.

From https://x.com/Hedgeye/status/2060435253928604065:

"Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO:

Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5.

This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months.

Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%.

The rules built to protect passive investors:

1. S&P 500 has required 12 months of trading and 4 quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both waived.

2. Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from 90 trading days to 15.

3. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing."

All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? What has gotten better other than the ability to produce more crap?

Anthropic at $1t for an IPO vs Google at $23b in 2004 sounds insane but Google's revenue at the time was $2.7b while Anthropic's already at $47b, so a valuation at about 20x vs 10x revenue. Anthropic also has very high revenue growth (50x since 2024), it doesn't seems quite as insane as it could be.

The way I've been thinking about it: there is too much money trying to pour into the market. That's why valuations are so high.

Maybe getting more of these big private companies public will bring valuations down a bit.

(Just my impression. No math or financial studies behind it :)

Net buying of corporate equities by American households, trusts, funds and non-profits has averaged $660bn per year for the last few years [1]. $200bn is not fundamentally a stretch for the American equity markets, let alone capital markets more broadly.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20260319/html/f22... line 16, 2023 to 2025

So they're not just racing to gain dominance in AI, they're also racing to IPO before the music stops?

IPOing and getting a bunch of cash, even if your stock subsequently suffers in the crash, is a lot better than being unable to get that capital infusion before the house of cards collapses.

> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn

I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).

[0] https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem

I don't think the market will swallow the stock offerings until we see early signs of GDP growth attributable to these entities. But until then, I think the cost is higher than the benefit, which "The dead economy theory" essay covered it well [0]

[0]: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

No doubt these companies are woefully overvalued. But this won’t stop me from putting in orders for several thousand dollars of shares with at market open. There will undoubtedly be plenty of buyers and I expect them to gain rapid entry into the indexes which will unlock a flood of additional capital from 401ks and pensions

Feels more like: can the bond market handle any potential outflows as money is rotated into these IPOs?

Can the stock market remain legitimate after such a brazen example of dumping? Regular everyday people can’t access private shares and participate in upside even if they want to. They don’t have the connections like VCs, and aren’t accredited investors. And companies ban secondary transactions, which should be forced by law to be always allowed.

And then after all that, the public have to deal with their index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, pensions, 401ks, etc buying up these overpriced stocks. You have a space company that also acquired a failing social media platform and failing AI company with little revenue justification for the valuation, and a lot of other obligations that make it financially a disaster (like payments owed for spectrum). And two frontier labs with no real moats, each looking for regulatory capture based on safety or ethics or whatever.

To the everyday person, the stock market after the fast listing rule, these three IPOs, and AI job loss, will feel no more legitimate than prediction markets or crypto.

What a headline

Why wouldn't it? There huge demand for these shares. It's not like $3+ trillion is dumped at once. It's a tiny percentage of it, and the high multiple does the rest of the work.

  World Online IPO

  That said, I don't even see "huge demand" for the AI triocorns right now. Unlike in 2000, most people are skeptical.

How long have the SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic investors been waiting for an IPO (excluding tender offers)? 24 years, 10 years, and 5 years.

You really think they are going to hold off against selling for multi-millions for another year, especially SpaceX?

OpenAI (and especially) Anthropic are at risk from being undercut by the Chinese labs and their open-weight models and may cause their valuations to be questioned.

If that doesn't cause a correction, then SpaceX will do it for them. There is no lock up for the 5% of shares being available.

So what people seem to be unaware of or are purposely ignoring is that OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset. There was a HN post from a day or two ago where someone bought a V100 for 150 pounds and connected it to their computer. Well that was a $10k GPU in 2017. That's the fate of H100/B100 GPUs in 5-10 years (and I suspect closer to 5). What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years? I think it'll be worse than that because modern hardware at that time will still probably be the same Wattage but have much higher performance so you'll be getting much higher performance-per-Watt and that's going to really matter.

The only company I'm confident will survive this hardware crunch and still be relatively successful in this space is Google.

OpenAI in particular is a bet that there will be an AI moat and that OpenAI will "win". I don't think there will be a moat and China is a big reason why (eg DeepSeek).

SpaceX is a little different. Yes, launching rockets is a business but it's not a trillion dollar business. 100 Falcon 9 launches doesn't even break $10 billion in revenue. Plus, Starship faces cost overruns, delays and significant headwinds.

But the real kicker is that SpaceX was used to bail out Elon from the Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from the first Twitter bailout. That's a problem because xAI is burning $1 billion a month in a company where that really matters and I don't think Grok will "win" here. Like, at all. SpaceX would be a significantly more attractive company without xAI.

The big potential growth area is Starlink. For that to justify this valuation I think you need handheld Starlink phones. That requires a lot of satellites at a relatively low orbit, which also means they have a relatively short life (because they burn up in the atmosphere). And for that Starship must succeed.

All the AI data center in space stuff is complete bullshit. It makes no sense. It'll never be viable. It's not going to happen.

EDIT: let me clarify because I was careless in my wording. So, Anthropic individually has not spent "trillions". That was more of a general statement on AI spending. Anthropic has raised ~$100B, the last round of which was $65B (at $965B post-money IIRC). This industry as a whole needs to recoup trillions.

Anthropic seems to be in a better position (as a business) than OpeNAI is but I do think the it's a race to cash out before depreciating assets, well, drepreciate and there's the real risk as compute becomes cheaper and the AI craze wears off, Claude just may not have the growth trajectory that is built into the price.

So, The Economist's paywall is unbypassable?

In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space.

In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.

Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).

Try to keep perspective, these valuations are just functions of the stock market the end result of some spreadsheet. They have nothing to do with quality of life. Why would you relate those two things in the first place?

Raven, Raven.. that's for those who can borrow against that to know and you to likely never find out.

What you thought your life would improve? Didn't you hear, wages are only increasing, why don't you invest some of that sweet cash into @JumpCrissCross' fund, it'll be alright. What were you going to do with healthcare anyway?

I think this is the story of tech in general. In my life, I've seen 3 really big steps down for the middle class: 2001, 2008 and then covid. Basic necessities are expensive today - people point to high GDP but what I see is high prices and poverty. And Tech, we've built a dystopian surveillance state.

> Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life?

I think these IPOs are going to mint tens of thousands of new millionaires or something. That, in turn, will generate massive tax windfalls for all levels of government.

> other than the ability to produce more crap?

This is a big "other than." (And to be clear, the jury is still out on whether AI will let us produce more in the long run.)

I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are predicting that the AI market is going to collapse. In fact, I think both are bullish that the public still isn't pricing in exponential growth.

I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.

The only reason I can think of for the accelerated S&P 500 inclusion of SpaceX is a pump and dump

Better for whom?

People keep predicting "house of cards" and keep being wrong. AI bubble was supposed to burst as far back as 2023. When was the last time since 2009 there was a $500+ billion tech valuation that lost 90% or more? After a certain point , 100% market penetration is achieved and these products become mainstream and profitability follows. See Uber and Tesla for examples.

The $175T number is unfair because it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are. You might as well say the US is in infinite debt, because we'll always be paying something for our military every year, so infinity years * any dollars = infinite debt.

Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.

Including all of the Social Security obligations for the current population is nonsense. For one it is money that will be paid from now for another ~60 years, and for 2 it's something that probably will just get cut as the trust fund starts getting into dire straits. It's not really an obligation if it's one act of congress away from being fixed (and without doing something like a debt jubilee that would destroy the dollar).

The rest of your article is complete bogus and the economic equivalent of climate change denial.

  The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.

  a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"

  In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt

[~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

The thing is that at these levels of debt, repayment is never the goal.

Government debt isn't like personal debt or business debt. The treasury can choose to not honur it, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that, but wouldn't you say they already have enough?

No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.

...what does this have to do with these IPOs?

> What do you do if you've invested $1 trillion that will be worth $100 billion or less in 5 years?

I think the aim would be to generate at least $900bn of cash flow from those assets.

"OpenAI and Anthropic have invested trillions in a rapdily depreciating asset". Anthropic raised a bit over 100B and has 47B ARR. Where are you getting trillions from ?

Starlink Mobile (i.e. Starlink direct-to-cellphone without modifications) is already happening, and fast. Phones that have the recently announced Qualcomm X105 modem will support Starlink Mobile 5G at speeds up to 150Mbps, direct from satellite. The Qualcomm X105 modem will be in most Android flagship phones coming later this year, and by 2027 most new phones will support Starlink direct-to-cell. The next iPhone that supports the 3GPP Rel-19 standard will too.

The rollout relies on Starlink V3 sats, which can only be launched Starship, but Starship progress is going well and is already able to deploy satellites from orbit. SpaceX is capable of launching Starlink V3 on the current iteration of Starship, but they want more testing. We'll probably see Starlink V3 launching late this year or early next year.

Source on the trillions invested?