The biggest IPO frenzy in human history is coming.
SpaceX submitted its prospectus to the U.S. SEC last week. According to reliable sources, OpenAI and Anthropic, two giants in the large - model field, are also preparing their prospectuses and may go public in the second and third quarters of this year respectively. Undoubtedly, they will become the three IPOs with the highest valuations and the largest financing scales in history:
SpaceX's prospectus has not yet disclosed its valuation and financing plan, but Wall Street expects its valuation to be $1.75 trillion, or even up to $2 trillion.
After completing a new round of financing in February this year, OpenAI's valuation was $862 billion.
Anthropic's valuation in the previous round of financing was $360 billion, but that's old news. Recently, the market widely expects its valuation to have surpassed OpenAI's.
That is to say, we may witness three IPOs with valuations exceeding $1 trillion in a row within a year (or even within three months)! This is unprecedented in human history! Moreover, the financing scales of these three companies should not be small. They are all big cash - outflow entities at present and need to invest heavily in AI infrastructure. Going public is not just for old shareholders to cash out, but to raise funds by taking full advantage of the current bull market in technology stocks. I won't be surprised if their IPO financing amounts are close to or even exceed $100 billion.
Before this, the IPOs with the largest fund - raising amounts in human history are (note: all include the underwriters' over - allotment options):
- Saudi Aramco, $29.4 billion including the greenshoe option;
- Alibaba, $25 billion;
- SoftBank Group, $23.5 billion;
- General Motors, $23.1 billion;
- Agricultural Bank of China, $22.1 billion;
- Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, $21.9 billion;
- AIA, $20.5 billion;
- Visa, $19.7 billion;
- NTT DoCoMo, $18.4 billion;
- Enel, $16.6 billion.
According to Reuters, SpaceX's target financing amount is $75 - 80 billion, which will almost certainly exceed the sum of the top three in the above list; if the market response is enthusiastic and the financing amount is adjusted upward, it may even exceed the sum of the top four! The target financing amounts of OpenAI and Anthropic are not clear yet, but their cash - flow situations are relatively poor, so it's possible that they will raise more funds, and at least they should not be much less than SpaceX. We can easily conclude that the total financing of these three behemoths is likely to exceed the sum of the financing of the top ten largest IPOs in human history...
Who said that human history has come to an end? Could anyone have made such a prediction just three years ago, or even one year ago?
If we calculate based on the valuation at the time of IPO pricing, the "three behemoths" don't represent a huge leap in history, mainly because Saudi Aramco is an outlier - its pre - opening valuation on the first day reached $1.7 trillion, making it the second company in Asia with a market value exceeding $1 trillion (guess who the first one is?). Assuming that SpaceX goes public with a valuation of $1.75 trillion or even $2 trillion, it will only slightly exceed Saudi Aramco; the market values of OpenAI and Anthropic will definitely be lower than Saudi Aramco's.
However, if we exclude Saudi Aramco, the valuations of the "three behemoths" will crush their predecessors in history: Alibaba's pre - opening valuation on the first day was $175 billion, ranking second so far and first in the technology industry; Facebook (now Meta) was $81 billion; the pre - opening valuations of all other companies, whether in the technology industry or not, were below $80 billion.
As long as there is no valuation inversion in OpenAI's IPO pricing, it will definitely reach or exceed five times that of Alibaba and eleven times that of Facebook back then. Anthropic's IPO valuation should be similar to OpenAI's, depending on whether the Token feast triggered by this wave of Agentic Workflow can continue. As for SpaceX, needless to say, its valuation can even exceed Saudi Aramco's, directly ranking fifth or sixth in the U.S. stock market by market value; the sum of the IPO valuations of the second to thirtieth companies in history may not even be as large as its (I haven't calculated it. Who can run a task with Claude Opus 4.7 to find out?)
About 120 years ago, John D. Rockefeller became the first billionaire in human history; this year, Elon Musk is likely to become the first trillionaire in human history (all in U.S. dollars). Even considering inflation, the exponential growth of the wealth of top - level billionaires is dazzling. Musk seems very lonely now, but he won't be lonely for long. As long as the AI wave continues, the emergence of the next trillionaire is just a matter of time, regardless of whether it's an old - timer like Ellison or Bezos.
Is there a bubble? This question is hard to answer because in the past three and a half years, all investors who thought there was a bubble in artificial intelligence have either been eliminated by the market or at least educated. However, some investment banks led by Merrill Lynch do think it's time to turn bearish - the "water - absorbing effect" of the three behemoth IPOs, the likely return of inflation, and the unstable global geopolitical situation may put an end to the long - lasting AI bull market. Believe it or not.
My view? I think it's debatable whether there is a bubble in the capital market (there probably is, and it's a big one), but the concept of artificial intelligence itself is not a bubble, and space exploration and even Mars immigration are even less of a bubble. I used to worry that the ladder of human progress had come to an end, that everything that could be invented had been invented and every territory that could be explored had been explored. Now it seems that there's no need to worry at all. In the lifetime of our generation and the next generation, humanity will still develop at an accelerating pace, although the development won't be linear and there will be setbacks.
May the glory of humanity last forever!
This article is from the WeChat official account "Internet Thieves' Group", written by Pei Pei, the leader of the Thieves' Group, and is published by 36Kr with authorization.