A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev on board, on Feb. 3.
Aubrey Gemignani NASA Getty Images
A slew of initial public offerings from major companies this year could top the market, strategists say, drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
SpaceX’s long-awaited IPO, confirmed in a regulatory filing Thursday and expected June 12, could mark the largest float in history. Elon Musk’s company is looking at a $1.75 trillion valuation on the Nasdaq.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic also announced their intentions to go public later this year.
All three companies are yet to produce a profit for the year, although Anthropic is expected to post its first ever profitable quarter in its upcoming earnings.
But analysts view each firm’s business model as inherently ambiguous, leading some to urge caution on the part of investors looking to buy into an IPO.
“I see it as the most important thing in the market,” John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks, told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe on Thursday.
“Everybody knows that the top is very close to being there and it’s usually advertised by these big IPOs. Back in 1999, we saw the same kind of thing where people were rushing to get these IPOs out.”
Great expectations
SpaceX recorded a net loss in the latest quarter of $4.28 billion after losing $4.94 billion in 2025.
Its Starlink arm generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, accounting for 69% of the total. Its aerospace business lost $619 million from operations, and its AI unit lost $2.5 billion — meaning communications is the company’s only profitable segment.
Sadly, SpaceX wrote in its S-1 filing Thursday that it “has a history of net losses and may not be profitable in the future.”
Much of its value depends on success in developing various “novel and untested” technologies, and SpaceX expects “to incur significant capital expenditures over a period of years” before its AI products and services become profitable, according to the document.
Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, said “little is known” about SpaceX’s finances because of its status as a private company, with Elon Musk controlling 85% of the voting rights. Coatsworth flagged the power of attention-grabbing symmetry as a potential danger to elevation.
“A valuation of $1.75 trillion would put SpaceX at 67 times sales, which is three times higher than Nvidia’s estimate based on the last fiscal year and the most recent share price,” he added. “It means the value of SpaceX could be richer than a plate of dauphinoise potatoes.”
SpaceX sees OpenAI as a key competitor in the race to dominate artificial intelligence, while Sam Altman’s company is also racing to be listed on the public markets later in 2026.
But OpenAI is also still profitable, leading some investors to question the potential for a broader fall in the stock market if the company continues on that path.
“If OpenAI and Anthropic can’t make money, this whole thing falls apart,” William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC on Wednesday.
“You could find OpenAI making the decision to IPO itself in a few months, giving us information that we see that it’s not going to make money, and that could be the end as well,” he added.
“I’m not saying it is, but that’s another possible, faster way to the ceiling in this growth.”
Deutsche Bank also issued the same warning in a paper published on Thursday.
“It remains to be seen how public markets will value OpenAI and its peers once they open their financial statements to scrutinize and explain the poorly understood economics of their business models,” wrote Deutsche Thematic Research Strategist Adrian Cox.
-CNBC’s Lora Kolodny also contributed to this report.
