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James David Spellman

Blockbuster initial public offerings from tech champions such as Anthropic and SpaceX are about to fundamentally reshape global capital markets.
This wave will redirect capital flows and alter valuations across the tech sector. As competition intensifies, investors worldwide will be forced to completely rethink where future returns will come from. For China, the rise of these companies will intensify an already fierce contest for global capital, putting further strain on foreign investment restrictions.
SpaceX could raise US$75 billion when it starts trading on the Nasdaq stock market potentially this week, shattering the previous record set by Saudi Aramco, which pulled in US$29 billion after going public in 2019.
The deal has drawn more orders than shares available – institutional investors have already placed orders for about US$10 billion or more in shares, new reports show. Up to 30 per cent of the offering is set aside for retail investors, reportedly the largest such allocation ever attempted. Bybit’s tokenised access to the IPO intensifies the frenzy. SpaceX is likely to rank among the most consequential public listings in financial history.
The IPO would value the company at about US$1.75 trillion – roughly 50 times book value and around 94 times 2025 revenue – though analysts differ widely on its worth. Morningstar estimates it at US$780 billion, describing the company’s “moat” as “indeterminate”, echoing Warren Buffett’s metaphor.
Only Alibaba and Meta have been valued at US$100 billion after their first day trading on US exchanges. “The SpaceX IPO alone could generate more exit value than all IPOs in the last decade,” Morningstar said. Yet, at its launch, it is still smaller than Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Anthropic is another of the three highly anticipated tech IPOs this year. The company behind the large-language model Claude has completed a US$65 billion fundraising round, putting its valuation at US$965 billion, a head-spinning rise from its US$380 billion value in February. Its annualised revenue run rate hit US$47 billion in May, up from around US$14 billion just months earlier. Observers believe it could beat rival OpenAI to public markets later this year, having submitted a confidential draft filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, developer of the widely used ChatGPT – with some 900 million weekly active users – has also filed a confidential S-1 registration statement in a key step to going public. A funding round of US$122 billion in March places its value at US$852 billion, with its IPO possibly reaching US$1 trillion.
All three offerings could add nearly US$4 trillion in market capitalisation to US exchanges. Furthermore, Alphabet has announced plans to raise US$85 billion through share sales, while Meta is reported to be considering raising billions of dollars in a stock offering. Both are driven by voracious financing needs in accelerating AI development.
SpaceX’s valuation challenges bedrock principles of calculating a company’s worth based on earnings, assets and predictable cash flows. That approach was more suitable for an industrial age dominated by tangible assets, analysts argue. Yet, as the late financial analyst Benjamin Graham warned, “With every new wave of optimism or pessimism, we are ready to abandon history and time-tested principles”.


Investors confront the challenge of valuing businesses whose greatest assets are not what they own or earn today, but what they might make decades from now. While the core strength of SpaceX is its rocket-launch capabilities, accounting now for 80 per cent of mass delivered to orbit, its AI division alone lost US$2.47 billion in the first quarter this year. It sees its greatest opportunities for growth in orbital data centres, bases on the moon and a colony on Mars. However, all require advances in engineering.
Much of the value of AI and other tech companies lies in intangible assets including intellectual property – Nvidia’s data management software CUDA, for example – as well as profits from transformative upheavals in business models and the unprecedented scale of ecosystems that companies seek to control.
These prospects are not easy to quantify and lack comparable examples for making forecasts while separating hype from reality. Acceleration in growth is another justification. The AI basket of stocks saw its first-quarter consensus earnings growth forecast surge from 23.6 per cent in early January to nearly 66 per cent recently, RBC Wealth Management reported.
Chinese investors and policymakers will be questioning why their tech firms trade at far lower multiples than companies on US markets. Investors, already balancing geopolitical concerns and potentially slower growth, may flock to the US IPOs, meaning potentially less capital investments in China. SpaceX also forces Beijing to rethink its financial system and ask whether its capital markets and regulations can create and sustain companies of similar scale.

One concern is how SpaceX could distort benchmark indices in unprecedented ways. Nearly US$30 trillion in assets are tied to major global indexes, including about US$27.7 trillion benchmarked to S&P Dow Jones Indices alone. Mutual funds or exchange traded funds will need to buy SpaceX to match indices’ performance, artificially changing performance and compressing price discovery. S&P Dow Jones Indices, however, will not amend its profitability or seasoning rules for megacap stocks.
SpaceX’s debut will reveal if capital markets are well equipped to finance high-risk, bold visions that will shape economic and geopolitical power. Retail investors, with lofty expectations and fears of being left out, will also be tested on whether long-running investment principles will continue to hold sway.


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Banking & finance

Why tech titans’ IPOs matter as much in China as in the US

Vehicles drive past a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket displayed outside a SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, California on June 8, ahead of the Elon Musk-founded rocket company's IPO on June 12. Photo: AFP

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gestures as he addresses a session on AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2025. Photo: AFP/Getty Images/TNS

An electronic board shows Shanghai stock indices as people walk on a pedestrian bridge in the Lujiazui financial district in Shanghai on March 2. Photo: Reuters

Hong Kong must be ready for Chinese firms’ ‘great repatriation’ of wealth

Illustration: Victor Sanjinez

A woman walks past financial district high-rise buildings in Singapore on May 19. Photo: AFP

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DeepSeek’s ultra-cheap V4 models have triggered a new round of competition, forcing rivals to rethink how they monetise AI. Photo: Reuters

AI unicorn MiniMax on Monday launched its next-generation flagship model, MiniMax M3, pairing token-based billing with subscription plans. Photo: Shutterstock

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A phone displays the skyrocketing share price of Moore Threads Technology, a Chinese chip firm, after its initial public offering in December. Photo: Getty Images

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Beijing will have to ask whether its capital markets and financial regulations can create and sustain companies of a similar scale


Beijing will have to ask whether its capital markets and financial regulations can create and sustain companies of a similar scale.


SpaceX

Investing

China technology

Stocks

Technology

Artificial intelligence (AI)

China stock market

Nasdaq

OpenAI

Anthropic

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Why tech titans’ IPOs matter as much in China as in the US

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Beijing will have to ask whether its capital markets and financial regulations can create and sustain companies of a similar scale

Beijing will have to ask whether its capital markets and financial regulations can create and sustain companies of a similar scale