How SpaceX Split the AI IPO Timeline for OpenAI and Anthropic

OpenAI is leaning toward delaying its IPO until 2027. CEO Sam Altman's advisers gave him a choice: list in late 2026 at a valuation below $1 trillion, or wait until next year and hold out for the number he wants. Altman called any reduction a "nonstarter."

Anthropic is doing the opposite. Despite early reporting that grouped both companies into a single "AI IPOs delayed to 2027" headline, Anthropic's confidential S-1 filing on 1 June started the SEC clock toward a public filing in roughly September 2026 and a targeted first trade date in October. IndMoney's analysis put it plainly: the headline that circulated after the initial Bloomberg report was, at best, half right. OpenAI is leaning later. Anthropic is not.

Both companies, in different ways, are responding to the same data point: SpaceX. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026 at $135 a share, the largest IPO in history. Within four trading days it hit $225.64, briefly making the company more valuable than Microsoft. By 29 June, after a single-day drop of 16.4%, shares closed at $154.60, down roughly 30% from the post-listing high. OpenAI read that correction as a reason to wait. Anthropic read it as a reason to move first.

Why OpenAI Is Waiting

The New York Times reported that OpenAI's advisers presented Altman with two options: list in late 2026 at a valuation below $1 trillion, or wait until 2027 and hold out for the trillion-dollar target. OpenAI's last private valuation was $852 billion, set in March 2026 through a $122 billion funding round backed by SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia. Reaching $1 trillion at listing would require roughly a 17% premium over that mark, a premium the company's own advisers concluded the current market was unlikely to support.

CFO Sarah Friar separately advocated for the delay on operational grounds, including a $3.7 billion annual burn rate, infrastructure commitments exceeding $600 billion through 2030, and the disclosure burden of quarterly public reporting. Reporting from Vaasblock noted that two independent decision paths, Altman's market read and Friar's operational read, converged on the same 2027 conclusion. The variable that changed in the prior two weeks was specifically the SpaceX share price action.

The market reaction to the delay news was immediate. SoftBank shares fell as much as 13% in a single day, the company's sharpest one-day drop in months, reflecting the fact that SoftBank had been counting on an OpenAI listing to help manage a $40 billion bridge loan with repayment due in March 2027.

Prediction markets have repriced accordingly. Kalshi data cited by CNBC shows a 59% probability that OpenAI formally announces its IPO by 1 March 2027, rising to 73% by June 2027, with the chance of a listing before 1 January 2027 at just 33%. Before the delay reporting, the probability of a 2026 listing sat at 30% to 40%.

Why Anthropic Is Racing Ahead

Anthropic's position is structurally different. The company closed a $65 billion Series H funding round in late May at a $965 billion valuation, overtaking OpenAI's private mark for the first time, then filed its confidential S-1 on 1 June, eleven days before SpaceX began trading.

IndMoney's analysis frames the divergence clearly: Anthropic's push toward an October listing is a strategic choice to claim first-mover pricing advantage in what may be the most consequential AI IPO. OpenAI's delay, by contrast, is a constraint, the math does not work at a $1 trillion valuation without either more revenue quarters or a friendlier market. Anthropic self-reports approximately $47 billion in annualised revenue as of May 2026, with the number of enterprise customers paying $1 million or more having doubled in under two months. Compute costs remain the pressure point for both companies: Anthropic has committed over $100 billion to AWS and $200 billion to Google Cloud, with additional deals across SpaceX, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Broadcom.

The strategic logic is straightforward. If Anthropic lists first, it sets the public market valuation multiple for AI inference revenue. Whatever benchmark Anthropic establishes in October becomes the comparable OpenAI has to clear whenever it eventually lists, whether that is late 2026 or sometime in 2027. Waiting carries its own risk for OpenAI: ceding the first AI IPO of this scale to its primary competitor, on a benchmark OpenAI did not get to set.

What the SpaceX Data Actually Shows

Here's what happened to the stock.

• SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share and opened trading at $150, implying a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion.
• The stock surged to $225.64 by 16 June, taking the market cap above $3 trillion and briefly surpassing both Amazon and Microsoft.
• From that peak, shares fell for six consecutive trading sessions: down 5% on Wednesday, 3.6% on Thursday, then 16.4% on the following Monday after the Juneteenth holiday.
• By 29 June, the stock was trading around $151 to $155, a decline of roughly 30% from the high and barely above the original IPO price.

Yahoo Finance reported that the company's current float sits at only 4.2% of total shares outstanding following the IPO, with insiders potentially eligible to sell up to 44% of total shares by early September, an increase to the float of approximately 900%. Reuters analysis cited by Al Jazeera found that of the 50 most-valued IPOs over the past five years, investors would have been better off buying an S&P 500 index fund roughly three-quarters of the time than buying into the IPO itself.

Wall Street's response has not been uniformly bearish. The average 12-month price target sits at $222.20, implying roughly 47% upside from current levels, according to TradingKey's analysis. The range of analyst targets is wide: a bull case of $401 if Starlink's commercialisation beats expectations and the company weathers the lock-up expiry cleanly, against a bear case of $115 if cash burn accelerates and the lock-up triggers panic selling.

What This Confirms About Laffont's Framework

Thomas Laffont of Coatue Management flagged two unmodeled risks at the All-In Liquidity Summit on 4 June: passive buying delays true price discovery to approximately six months post-IPO, and intensifying competitive dynamics between OpenAI and Anthropic as both companies approach public markets.

The SpaceX correction is the first risk playing out, just three weeks later. The stock's initial surge to $225 reflected index-driven buying pressure, not a settled market view of fundamental value. The subsequent 30% correction is the price discovery process Laffont described, arriving well before the six-month mark he estimated.

OpenAI and Anthropic reaching opposite conclusions from the same data point is itself informative. It shows two companies under similar pressure making different bets about what the market wants right now, valuation certainty versus first-mover positioning, and that divergence is exactly the kind of competitive dynamic Laffont flagged as underpriced in most frameworks.

What This Means for Pre-IPO Investors

1. Don't confuse the stock price with the business. SpaceX fell on valuation compression and lock-up overhang, not because anything changed with launch cadence, Starlink growth, or AI infrastructure positioning. The first six months after a listing are dominated by index mechanics and positioning, not fundamentals. If you're judging the original thesis by what the stock did in week three, you're judging it by the wrong data.

2. OpenAI and Anthropic are not on the same timeline, and investors holding both should plan accordingly. Anthropic is targeting October 2026. OpenAI is targeting sometime in 2027, contingent on market conditions and its $1 trillion valuation target being achievable. If you hold positions in both, your liquidity timeline for one is materially shorter than the other, and conflating the two means misjudging when capital actually returns.

3. Watch the September lock-up, not the next earnings call. SpaceX's float can expand nearly tenfold by early September as insiders become eligible to sell. That is the next event that will actually move the stock, and the next real-world data point for how Anthropic's October listing might trade in its own first weeks.

The Practical Takeaway

The thesis that the largest private AI and space companies would generate exceptional public market value has not been disproven by three weeks of trading data. What has been demonstrated is that the path from private to public is more sensitive to near-term sentiment, and more competitively contested, than the "2026 is IPO season" narrative implied earlier this year.

For wholesale investors, the lesson is procedural: treat the first several months of any major company's public trading as a period of price discovery distorted by index mechanics and lock-up dynamics, not as a clean signal of whether the original investment thesis was correct. And treat OpenAI and Anthropic as two separate timelines making two different bets, not a single "AI IPO wave" moving in lockstep.

NonPublic's Secondaries Marketplace gives eligible investors the ability to manage exposure as these timelines shift, rather than being locked into decisions made before this much real-world data existed.

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