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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
On June 12, SpaceX is going public at $135 per share and a $1.75 trillion valuation.
4% of total shares are being offered. Of those, 30% have been allocated for retail investors to buy directly at the $135 IPO price. The standard retail allocation in a mega-cap IPO is 5 to 10% of shares, with the overwhelming majority reserved for large institutional buyers like pension funds and mutual fund managers.
SpaceX is tripling that, which is unusual.
At a $75 billion raise, that is roughly $22.5 billion in shares flowing directly to retail. More than many entire IPOs.
One of SpaceX’s lead underwriters told Reuters they had never seen anything like the expected retail demand.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have also filed to go public sometime this fall.
It is a mad rush to raise capital to fund the AI infrastructure buildout. Valuations defy gravity and become a moving target as ARRs change every month and cash-burning businesses like xAI flip to cash-flowing with the stroke of a single deal.
IPOs Are Dangerous, Right?
Truist analyst Keith Lerner pulled the data on 30 major IPOs from the last 15 years.
