SpaceX IPO went live on June 12, and since then company’s stock has risen by nearly 40 percent. Dubbed the ‘biggest IPO in history’ Elon Musk’s company gained a valuation of $1.8 trillion when the stock debuted on the NASDAQ at $135 per share.
It reached a record intraday high of $225 and even surpassed Amazon as the fifth-most valuable company in the world.
The Coin Headlines caught up with Diego Martin, CEO of Yellow Capital, to understand what these numbers really mean and what investors should look out for as other major AI companies prepare to launch their IPOs.
Q: SpaceX absorbed xAI in an all-stock deal earlier this year, making this IPO as much an AI bet as an aerospace one. Does a $75 billion raise at a $1.77 trillion valuation effectively set the floor price for every AI infrastructure deal that follows including OpenAI and Anthropic or does SpaceX’s unique Starlink revenue model make it a poor benchmark for pure-play AI companies?
SpaceX should not be a standard benchmark for pure-play AI companies, and I think investors will treat it as a special case rather than a new floor for the sector, for structural reasons. SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 across three distinct business lines: satellite connectivity, launch services, and, as of the xAI merger, AI. Starlink alone contributed $11.4 billion of that, with a 63 percent EBITDA margin. That kind of diversified, cash-generating infrastructure business commands a premium that a pre-profit AI company simply cannot replicate, regardless of how compelling the technology story is.
OpenAI and Anthropic will attract enormous attention of course when they come to market, but they are all in all different propositions. OpenAI is generating around $25 billion in annualised revenue and targeting a $1 trillion listing while Anthropic crossed $30 billion in annualised revenue with 1,400 percent year-over-year growth and is in talks at a $900 billion-plus valuation. While those are extraordinary numbers, they are concentrated AI stories without the infrastructure diversification that SpaceX offers. I think that investors will price them on AI-specific multiples, not on the SpaceX template.
The more useful takeaway from SpaceX is the signal it sends about investor appetite for transformative technology at scale. The book ran five times oversubscribed, with retail demand alone exceeding $70 billion and that tells you the capital is there for companies that can demonstrate real revenue and a credible path to dominance. For investors, it’s important to note that each of these listings will be priced on its own fundamentals, not benchmarked against SpaceX.
Q: Starlink is doing the real revenue work inside SpaceX contributing $11.4 billion of the company’s $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue but average revenue per subscriber has already dropped 33 percent since 2023 and SpaceX’s own S-1 forecasts further declines. If the satellite business softens, does XAI’s AI upside give investors enough reason to hold?
Starlink is unquestionably the financial engine of SpaceX today, and the ARPU pressure is real. Average revenue per subscriber fell from $99 per month in 2023 to $66 in Q1 2026, even as the subscriber base more than doubled from 4.4 million to 10.3 million. Operating income in Q1 barely moved despite that subscriber growth, rising from $1.03 billion to $1.19 billion and those are numbers investors need to take seriously.
But I think the ARPU decline reflects a deliberate strategic choice rather than a structural weakness. SpaceX is prioritising global market share over short-term revenue per user, which is a classic infrastructure scaling playbook. The economics of satellite connectivity improve with density because once the constellation is deployed, the marginal cost of adding subscribers in emerging markets is extremely low, and the enterprise and government segments, where Starlink commands significantly higher pricing, continue to grow.
On xAI specifically, to be honest, it is not yet the revenue story but rather an optionality bet. xAI is still in its investment phase, and the AI segment is burning cash, but that is exactly how investors are pricing it because as of now they are paying a Starlink-justified valuation today with an embedded call option on AI upside tomorrow. As long as Starlink continues to generate strong cash flow and the AI narrative remains credible, I think investors will hold through near-term ARPU pressure.
Q: With SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet all raising capital simultaneously, potentially $500 billion in aggregate, does the market actually have that spare change, and what has to get sold to fund it?
A:
The capital exists, but the competition for it is already reshaping markets in ways that are visible right now, including in crypto.
To put the scale in context, CoinDesk reported that SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic alone are expected to pull in more than $240 billion by year-end so when you add Databricks, Cerebras, and the broader AI IPO pipeline, total capital demand could exceed the entire 2025 US IPO market by two to four times.
Something has to give, and we are already seeing what as capital is rotating out of risk assets that were previously the highest-beta plays available. Bitcoin is down roughly 30 percent year-to-date while the Solana Foundation’s president said publicly on CNBC that crypto’s weak price action is partly driven by investors rotating capital into SpaceX. Reuters ran analysis arguing the SpaceX IPO could drain the same liquidity pool that has been supporting crypto.
For crypto specifically, the dynamic is straightforward: digital assets have historically attracted capital seeking high-growth, high-risk exposure that investors are willing to take on. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic now offer that same profile but with revenue, institutional credibility, and equity upside. While that does not mean crypto loses permanently, it does mean the asset class is competing for attention and capital in a way it has not had to before. In my point of view. the projects and platforms that will hold up best are those with real revenue, real users, and a clear value proposition beyond speculation while the ones that were relying purely on narrative will feel the pressure most.
Q: The Nasdaq rose strongly in the year following five of the seven largest IPOs in history but the single biggest one-year decline came after Visa’s March 2008 IPO, which preceded the Global Financial Crisis. Goldman Sachs says none of today’s classic bull-market-top conditions are fully in play yet. At what point does SpaceX’s success become a contrarian sell signal for the broader market?
A:
The Visa parallel is worth taking seriously, but the mechanism matters more than the pattern. Visa’s 2008 IPO did not cause the financial crisis. It happened to price into a market that was already sitting on top of a leverage bomb in housing and structured credit, and the IPO was a symptom of late-cycle euphoria, not the trigger.
The question for 2026 is whether we are building a similar hidden fragility underneath the surface. Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett has flagged that adding SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic to the S&P 500 could push tech’s index weighting past 48 percent, which is the concentration level that has coincided with every major bubble peak of the past century. For those that follow these narratives closely, that is a data point worth watching closely.
At the same time, Goldman’s observation that classic top conditions are not fully in play is important. We are not seeing the kind of indiscriminate capital allocation that defined previous peaks. SpaceX’s book was five times oversubscribed, but the demand was concentrated on a company with $18.7 billion in revenue and dominant market positions in multiple sectors and overall that is different from late-1999 capital flowing into companies with no revenue and no plan.
The signal I would watch is what happens next in the IPO cycle. If OpenAI and Anthropic list at similar or higher multiples and the market absorbs all of it without repricing risk, that tells you liquidity is deeper than people think. But, If the market starts struggling to absorb the second and third mega-IPO, that is when the contrarian signal becomes real.
Q: Nvidia trades at roughly 21x trailing sales and is massively profitable. SpaceX is asking investors to value it at more than four times its revenue, even as it continues to run a net loss. For SPCX to rival Nvidia’s stock performance from its own IPO era, what has to go right?
The gap between SpaceX and Nvidia is the profit structure underneath it because Nvidia generates enormous free cash flow and has become genuinely indispensable infrastructure. Every major AI lab in the world needs Nvidia hardware and that kind of structural dependency justifies a premium.
SpaceX is trading at roughly 90 times trailing revenue on $18.7 billion in 2025 sales, with a net loss of $4.9 billion for the year and $4.3 billion in Q1 2026 alone. The AI segment, which is the growth story investors are paying for, burned $2.5 billion in a single quarter. Those are real numbers that need to improve materially for the valuation to hold over time.
For SpaceX to deliver Nvidia-level returns from here, three things need to happen. First, Starlink has to prove it can grow revenue while stabilising or improving unit economics, not just adding subscribers at declining ARPU. Second, Starship needs to unlock genuinely new commercial markets, whether that is point-to-point transport, orbital manufacturing, or dramatically cheaper launch economics for third parties. Third, and most importantly, xAI has to become indispensable in the way Nvidia is indispensable. Not just another competitive AI lab, but infrastructure that other companies and governments depend on and I think that will be the hardest part, because the AI market already has well-funded incumbents with significant leads.
If all three come together over the next decade, today’s price could look reasonable but the margin for error is extremely thin at this valuation, and execution risk across three simultaneous bets is high.
Q: Nvidia became a multi-trillion dollar company by being indispensable infrastructure that every AI lab needed to buy from. SpaceX’s pitch is similar but its customers include governments and militaries, not just tech companies. Elon Musk is a highly political figure. Will the market factor this into its valuation of SpaceX and how does this play out long term if, say, there is a change in US presidency?
The political risk is real and investors are already pricing some of it in, whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not.
Musk’s involvement with DOGE earlier this year was a clear demonstration of how political entanglement can create business risk. He stepped down early, described the experience as not worth the backlash, and the episode coincided with significant brand damage to Tesla. Trump then reportedly referred to him as a political liability and the two have since publicly clashed over fiscal policy. Musk has since launched a new political movement that directly challenges Trump-aligned Republicans. None of this is theoretical but it’s happening now.
For SpaceX specifically, the exposure is concentrated in government and defence contracts, which are inherently subject to political cycles. A change in administration could shift procurement priorities, renegotiate contract terms, or introduce new oversight requirements. That is a structural feature of operating in the defence and space sectors, and it applies to every major contractor, not just SpaceX.
However, I think the market will ultimately weigh SpaceX’s operational position more heavily than Musk’s political profile. SpaceX launched 83 percent of all mass sent to orbit in 2025 and Starlink is embedded in military and civilian communications infrastructure across dozens of countries. Overall, that kind of dependency is very difficult for any government to unwind quickly, regardless of who is in office. The political risk creates volatility and headline risk, but the infrastructure position provides a floor. Investors will price in a discount for the noise, but they are unlikely to abandon a company that has made itself this operationally critical.
Q: Bank of America has described this IPO wave as “a large-scale transfer of accumulated risk from early investors to the public market.” If SpaceX trades materially below its $135 listing price in the first weeks, it doesn’t just hurt SPCX holders, it challenges the entire framework that says pre-profitable AI-adjacent companies deserve frontier valuations. Is that the real systemic risk here: not a liquidity drain, but a confidence drain that reprices every AI company in one bad trading week?
Yes, the confidence risk is far more dangerous than the liquidity risk, and I think most people are underestimating how quickly sentiment can cascade.
Capital markets can absorb a $75 billion raise and they do it regularly across sovereign debt, secondary offerings, and private placements. However, what they cannot absorb easily is a sudden loss of faith in the valuation framework that justified the raise in the first place. SpaceX went public at roughly 90 times trailing revenue with a $4.9 billion net loss in 2025 and an AI segment that burned $6.4 billion last year. If that stock breaks below its IPO price, every investor holding OpenAI at $1 trillion or Anthropic at $900 billion has to ask themselves whether their own position is built on the same assumptions that just failed publicly.
That said, I do not think a single IPO can kill the AI investment thesis. The demand for compute, infrastructure, and intelligence systems is real and accelerating. What a failed SpaceX debut would kill is the willingness to pay frontier multiples for companies that have not yet proven they can convert AI spending into AI profits, and that distinction matters enormously, because most of the companies in the current IPO pipeline are still in that pre-profit category.
For crypto, this is directly relevant because digital assets sit in the same risk-on liquidity pool as high-growth tech. BTC is already down roughly 30 percent this year, partly because capital is rotating into exactly these mega-IPOs. If confidence in frontier tech valuations breaks, the repricing does not stop at AI stocks. It moves through every asset class that depends on speculative conviction, and crypto is near the front of that queue. The bottom line is this, the biggest risk in markets right now is that too much money is priced for perfection in companies that have not yet delivered it.
