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Comment by guluarte | Hacker News Reader

"Hey, don't invest too much in Spacex or Anthropic. We're planning an IPO too."

This is the real reason. I don't think equity market has enough capital to support three companies of this size.

SpaceX IPO is slated to be $75-80bn — the market has size for that. We also have seen robust options and finance markets for AAPL and NVDA over the last years that make the broader ecosystem not overly worrying in my armchair opinion.

I’m not clear how much crossover demand there is between SX and Anthropic/oAI — that seems like the more interesting question. I’m guessing if we had Anthropic/oAI launching at the same time we’d see some pretty interesting capital dynamics.

> if we had Anthropic/oAI launching at the same time

Don't we have exactly that? There are S-1 announcements for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Google is selling to raise money for infra (IIRC). There's an absurd amount of money flowing in at present (prospectively at least).

The reality is that the large banks running these IPOs will know, to an extreme level of granularity, how much demand for the IPO there is at the chosen price point, and will advise accordingly.

None of the companies needs an IPO right now, with the possible exception of oAI — I haven’t looked at their financials recently. But SX is cashflow positive as of today, and Anthropic is able to become so without giving up much on their R&D program. So for those two, it’s a matter of timing.

Like a video game release schedule or a film release, SX has carved out a window and is going first, and regardless of messaging, all the teams are going to be watching it VERY VERY carefully. If it goes well, I’d expect Anthropic to jump next.

If that goes well, oAI would likely go right after. If it goes mid, oAI may wait to improve their financial story or fundraise private at worse valuations for a while, or, or, or.

Agreed that the dream for the next guys down the road is to pick up some recycled capital gains from sx and of course some new capital. If SX is a flop, then these IPO dreams will slow down for a minute.

None of these companies are worth the numbers being tossed around, but SpaceX especially so.

Its Schrodinger's IPO: the space business is so successful how could you question the company's worth? You can't afford to miss out on the next biggest AI business to invest in!

What's going to happen is the music will stop and it's just a question of who cashed in when it does. OpenAI are easily the most vulnerable here.

I was under the impression SpaceX was going to be a trillion dollar company.

The media and market is hyping these three companies up to be all trillion dollar companies.

Afaik SpaceX is only putting 5% of its shares up on the public market when it IPOs (newly minted shares, diluting the existing private shareholders).

So the markets only "need to absorb" $75B when SpaceX IPOs, not its whole $1.7T valuation. At least until the lockup period expires.

Gotcha, that seems a bit more manageable for the market to absorb.

I think it will still be a bit tight with Anthropic and OpenAI IPO'ing at similar times however.

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