The old economy is being crowded to the margins
SpaceX plans June 12 IPO targeting $74.4B, potentially valuing it at $1.77T and displacing Meta from the original Magnificent Seven. Anthropic and OpenAI also approaching IPO with valuations near $1T, reflecting explosive AI sector growth and profitability emergence in generative AI.
- SpaceX IPO set for June 12, targeting $74.4 billion and $1.77 trillion valuation
- Anthropic valued at $965 billion after $65 billion funding round; sales tripled in Q1
- Six semiconductor companies now exceed $1 trillion market cap; Nvidia reached $5 trillion
SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs will expand the exclusive trillion-dollar market cap club, with SpaceX alone potentially reaching $1.77 trillion and reshaping the global market hierarchy dominated by AI and semiconductor companies.
Three years ago, a Bank of America analyst named Michael Hartnett gave a name to something that was happening in the stock market. He called seven giant technology companies the "Magnificent Seven"—Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—and the phrase stuck. It became shorthand for the strange new shape of American capitalism: a handful of companies controlling more than a third of the entire market's value. But the name was already becoming obsolete even as people repeated it.
This week, that exclusivity is collapsing. SpaceX is preparing to go public on June 12, and if the offering succeeds as Elon Musk expects, it will raise $74.4 billion and value the company at $1.77 trillion. That single transaction would shatter the previous record for an initial public offering—Saudi Aramco's $25 billion debut in 2019—and immediately place SpaceX among the ten most valuable companies on Earth. It would bump Meta, one of Hartnett's original seven, right out of the top tier. Musk has merged SpaceX with his artificial intelligence company, xAI, and is betting that investors will overlook the company's current losses in favor of his promises about Mars colonization and the future of space exploration.
Anthropicand OpenAI are not far behind. Anthropic, the startup behind Claude, a chatbot that has become the darling of the AI world, filed its IPO paperwork confidentially this week. Just days before announcing its public market debut, the company raised $65 billion in private funding that valued it at $965 billion—three times what it was worth at the start of the year and already ahead of OpenAI's $852 billion valuation. Anthropic has something Musk's companies often lack: a path to actual profit. Claude has found real customers in the business world, and the company's sales tripled in the first quarter after launching Claude Cowork, a model that can handle complex programming tasks without requiring code. The company expects to turn its first quarterly profit soon and projects it will be fully profitable by 2028. OpenAI has not yet filed to go public, though its founder Sam Altman has suggested it will happen when the time is right. Bloomberg reports the company plans to submit its paperwork to regulators in the coming weeks.
If all three companies reach their expected valuations, they will represent more than five percent of the entire American stock market—a flood of new shares unseen since the dot-com bubble twenty years ago. But the artificial intelligence revolution has already rewritten the market in ways that go far beyond these three debuts. Nvidia, which makes graphics processors, has become the most valuable company in the world. It crossed the four trillion dollar mark and then the five trillion mark, where it now sits. In October 2022, before ChatGPT's launch sent demand for its chips into the stratosphere, Nvidia was worth less than $400 billion.
The hunger for the components that power AI—processors, semiconductors, memory capacity—has pushed six chip companies past the trillion-dollar threshold. After Nvidia broke through in 2023, TSMC and Broadcom joined the club the following year. In May, Samsung and SK Hynix from South Korea, both specialists in memory chips, crossed over, as did American semiconductor maker Micron. All six now rank among the fifteen most valuable companies globally. TSMC and Samsung, which were already substantial enterprises when the AI race began, have quadrupled their stock value in five years. Nvidia, Broadcom, Micron, and SK Hynix have seen their shares multiply by as much as ten times. But the ride has not been smooth. The AI sector is volatile, haunted by questions about whether the enormous spending on infrastructure will ever generate real returns. All these companies have experienced sharp corrections along the way, some mild and others severe.
This week brought a reminder of how quickly sentiment can shift. Broadcom's stock plummeted 12.6 percent on Thursday—its worst single day in more than sixteen months—after the company's sales forecast disappointed investors. It projected $16 billion in revenue for the third quarter, well below the $17.2 billion analysts had expected. As SpaceX prepares for what many see as a watershed moment for the AI market, investors were reminded that even in a boom, missing your numbers still hurts.
What is striking about the trillion-dollar club now is how little room remains for anything else. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant and the world's largest petroleum producer, will fight SpaceX for the title of eighth-most-valuable company, with a market value of $1.75 trillion. Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's sprawling financial conglomerate, sits just above the trillion-dollar line, as does Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company riding its own wave with an obesity drug called Mounjaro. Walmart, the supermarket chain that once seemed like it would dominate forever, is somewhere below them. The rest of the top ranks are filling with more AI-adjacent companies like AMD, ASML, and Oracle, mixed in with aging titans like JPMorgan and Exxon that are fighting to hold their ground. The old economy has not disappeared, but it is being crowded to the margins of a market that has decided its future belongs to semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and space.
Citações Notáveis
We'll go public when we think it makes sense— Sam Altman, OpenAI founder, on the company's IPO timeline
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does it matter that SpaceX is going public now, at this particular moment?
Because it signals that the market has decided AI infrastructure is worth more than almost anything else. SpaceX is losing money, but investors are willing to value it at nearly two trillion dollars. That tells you something about where capital thinks the future is.
But Anthropic seems different—it's actually making money, or close to it. Why isn't that the bigger story?
It should be. Anthropic is the proof that generative AI can become a real business, not just a speculative bet. Claude has customers who pay for it. That's rarer than you'd think in this space. But SpaceX is bigger and louder, so it dominates the conversation.
What happens to companies like Walmart or Exxon in a market like this?
They keep existing, they keep making money, but they're no longer the center of gravity. They're defending their position against wind and tide. The market has moved on to something it thinks is more important.
Is this sustainable? Can six semiconductor companies really all be worth a trillion dollars?
That depends entirely on whether AI actually delivers the returns everyone is betting on. Right now, the spending is enormous and the profits are still uncertain. Broadcom just got punished for missing expectations by a billion dollars. The market is patient, but not infinitely so.
So what's the real risk here?
That we're building a market that's entirely dependent on a handful of companies and a single technology. If AI doesn't pan out the way people expect, or if one of these companies stumbles, the whole structure could shift very quickly. We've seen this before.