{"id":499605,"date":"2026-06-14T18:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T18:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/499605\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T18:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T18:26:08","slug":"as-ai-companies-race-to-go-public-who-else-is-along-for-the-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/499605\/","title":{"rendered":"As AI companies race to go public, who else is along for the ride?"},"content":{"rendered":"

SpaceX went public this week in the largest IPO ever<\/a>, making CEO Elon Musk the world\u2019s first trillionaire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite its name, SpaceX has been emphasizing the potential of its costly AI business<\/a>, and competitors OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic<\/a> may soon follow with their own public market debuts. So on the latest episode of TechCrunch\u2019s Equity podcast<\/a>, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O\u2019Kane, and I discussed what\u2019s looking like a hot IPO summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have SpaceX not only sucking up just a huge chunk of the money that\u2019s available on public markets, but also really stress testing the limits of what a public company can be and how much it can be controlled by one single person,\u201d Sean said. \u201cMy eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and how much they will try to emulate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kirsten also noted that there are other startups trying to \u201cride that SpaceX IPO wave,\u201d for example by raising money for orbital data centers after SpaceX helped to popularize the concept.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo there\u2019s a ripple effect that\u2019s happening throughout the market that I think is probably even more interesting than just the headline, \u2018SpaceX makes Elon a trillionaire,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Anthony Ha: I want to zoom out a little bit from just the SpaceX IPO, because beyond the Elon Musk of it all, it\u2019s the beginning of what could be a [series] of different IPOs for different AI companies. We\u2019ve talked about Anthropic confidentially filing to go public, and now OpenAI has done the same. How excited are either of you about this?<\/p>\n

Kirsten Korosec: I want to start off by saying that I love Julie Bort\u2019s story, which I think sums it up pretty nicely. It\u2019s a great headline, so I\u2019m gonna read it here: \u201cIt\u2019s not FAANG anymore, it\u2019s MANGOS<\/a>.\u201d FAANG being Facebook, which is now Meta; Amazon; Apple; Netflix; Google, now Alphabet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s shifted, and we\u2019ve got Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX. [We\u2019ve still got] massive tech companies, surely, but there is a shift here, right? First of all, we\u2019ve got a bunch of AI labs in there, and that\u2019s very different. Netflix gets booted out of there, a giant streaming service. And so to me, it\u2019s an interesting shift in terms of public markets and the vast amount of money and capital available in the public markets shifting away from consumer [and] social networks and towards, specifically, AI labs and other, more innovative deeptech, such as SpaceX.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I think that\u2019s the most interesting thing \u2014\u00a0 aside from the fact that this summer is going to keep us all very busy as reporters, more than probably any other summer in a while.<\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Kane: You know, once upon a time I wanted to be a lawyer, and one of the reasons I didn\u2019t was because I hated the paperwork that was going to be involved. And here I am looking forward to reading hundreds more pages of SEC filings this summer \u2014\u00a0 talk about a beach read.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a moment we\u2019ve been anticipating for a while. We\u2019ve spent the last few years really wondering if the IPO market was going to quote-unquote \u201copen back up\u201d after a lot of consternation about private markets, and mockery about people reaching their like Series [whatever] fundraising round. This is a good stress test \u2014 I mean, \u201cgood,\u201d take that word however you want \u2014 a good stress test of public markets in general.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We have SpaceX not only sucking up just a huge chunk of the money that\u2019s available on public markets, but also really stress testing the limits of what a public company can be and how much it can be controlled by one single person. My eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and how much they will try to emulate.<\/p>\n

A thing that I keep saying and thinking about with SpaceX is, they\u2019re really trying to take some of the most extreme aspects of Google and Meta\u2019s original IPOs back in the early 2000s and mashing it up with that \u201cWe\u2019ll lose money forever\u201d with Amazon. And I\u2019m curious how much Anthropic and OpenAI will try to do the same. Will they remake themselves in the image of SpaceX? Or will they try to put themselves in a different light?<\/p>\n

Anthony: One aspect that really got driven home as I was reading about the OpenAI IPO is also the extent to which some of this is also a bit of a race in terms of timing. I think we can confidently say at this point, SpaceX is first out the gate, which probably has some advantages and disadvantages. It\u2019s also a bit of a different company because it\u2019s billing itself as an AI company, but obviously has a bunch of other stuff going on, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there is a sense in which, at least according to some analysts, OpenAI and Anthropic may both want to go before the other one, because there\u2019s only a finite amount of capital, a finite amount of interest. At some point some of these valuations have to start coming back down to Earth, and so they may both be scrambling to be first.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kirsten: I mean, there\u2019s very much a race between Anthropic and OpenAI. You\u2019re even seeing OpenAI talk about slashing prices, and they\u2019re certainly going to be competing on the IPO calendar. But that is very short-term thinking. If they\u2019re smart, they should be much more concerned about the long-term play here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To me, what\u2019s really interesting is while Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX all prepare for these moments, there are a host of other companies out there that are raising money on the backs of the success of companies like SpaceX, or going into SPACs. Just today, for instance, or as we\u2019re recording this, a company called Quantum Space is doing a SPAC<\/a> and absolutely trying to ride that SpaceX IPO wave.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got a host of other startups that our reporter Tim Ferholz has reported on that are clearly \u2014 they\u2019re not going to go public, right? But if SpaceX is successful with space data centers, they\u2019re raising money off of that potential and they\u2019re building businesses on that potential. So there\u2019s a ripple effect that\u2019s happening throughout the market that I think is probably even more interesting than just the headline, \u201cSpaceX makes Elon a trillionaire.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Sean: The commonly accepted theory in Silicon Valley is that AI is remaking the economy, but because of its use. AI is actually already remaking the economy \u2014 just because of how people are trying to build it. We have everything that you just described, we have these other companies rushing to public markets. And I think that\u2019s a really good point to think about: Will they ever regret rushing to public markets?<\/p>\n

But we even have companies like Ford and General Motors who are pivoting their unused battery creation capacity to be energy providers for data centers. And Ford\u2019s stock shot up when it announced what is honestly a pretty modest-looking energy storage business<\/a>, in comparison to something like Tesla. And Tim De Chant had a really great series of stories this week about GM\u2019s pivot<\/a>, as well.<\/p>\n

The economy\u2019s already being remade. Whether that\u2019s durable, again, that\u2019s the question, but it\u2019s happening right now.<\/p>\n

Kirsten: That is actually a really good point, because to me, I want to say five, six, seven, eight years ago, there were all these headlines of \u201cthe next Tesla killer\u201d and these automakers and other companies are still chasing trying to recreate all these various businesses, and specifically the strategies of Elon Musk-based businesses. They haven\u2019t learned their lesson.<\/p>\n

I wish I could communicate this to all the automaker CEOs out there: I get it that you have a lot of unused batteries and you want to pivot to something else, but trying to model your business after Tesla or SpaceX and others, it doesn\u2019t always work. Perhaps look elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Sean: So Ford shouldn\u2019t get into space data centers. Is what you\u2019re saying?<\/p>\n

Kirsten: No, they shouldn\u2019t. But just watch. This is going to happen.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX went public this week in the largest IPO ever, making CEO Elon Musk the world\u2019s first trillionaire.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,605,33694,61,60,2306,80],"class_list":["post-499605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-elon-musk","tag-equity-podcast","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-spacex","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}