SpaceX is ready to go public. The stock market is its rocket.
April 16, 2026
The thirst for risk is most definitely back. New record highs for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq prove it. And what is the riskiest bet of all? An IPO, of course.
SpaceX has already filed confidentially for an initial public offering. And Wall Street is waiting with bated breath for artificial-intelligence leaders OpenAI and Anthropic to file their paperwork, which more than likely are a few months down the road.
The three companies could be worth more than $3 trillion once they debut. Demand will be strong, if buzz is any measure, and could ratchet up even more by the comeback for the Magnificent Seven.
“We could get some extremely large transactions in the middle and back half of this year,” Mark Schwartz, the chief IPO advisor for EY, told Barron’s. “We’re encouraged that the outlook for growthier names is looking more positive. That should translate to a better and broader IPO market.”
Thursday brought an IPO, the biggest of the year. Madison Air, a filtration and ventilation company—perhaps its best known brand is Big Ass Fans—raised about $2.2 billion from its stock sale at a valuation of $13.3 billion. The stock rose nearly 20% in its debut.
Madison Air is setting the tone for this year’s IPOs. Fewer but much bigger.
Through mid-April, 38 companies worth at least $50 million have gone public—down 41.5% from the same time a year ago, according to Renaissance Capital. But these companies have raised $13.3 billion in proceeds, up 35%.
“Many of this year’s newly public companies already sport multibillion-dollar equity valuations, reflecting a pipeline with more mature businesses than early-stage speculative listings,” wrote Jessica Rabe, co-founder of DataTrek Research, on Thursday.
Rabe noted that this year’s biggest IPOs so far are PayPay, a Japanese digital payments app, and Forgent Power Solutions, an energy infrastructure company. They have market valuations of $14.6 billion and $10.3 billion, respectively. Both stocks have performed well—Forgent is up about 20% from its IPO price and PayPay has gained roughly 35%.
The third-largest IPO, Janus Living, has also been a winner. The real estate investment trust is worth nearly $7 billion. The stock is up more than 30% from its IPO price.
There are notable offerings that are big losers, too. Crypto firm BitGo, cancer biotech Eikon Therapeutics. and Medtronic diabetes carve-out MiniMed are off sharply from their offering prices.
“This suggests that IPO investors are, on the whole, expressing a healthy wariness towards newly public companies,” Rabe said.
But will Wall Street throw caution to the wind with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic? The high demand screams “yes.”
SpaceX in particular has a lot going for it: Tesla’s Elon Musk is the founder. It’s profitable—at least on an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) basis—and has a sizable revenue base. And it will be an AI play because it merged earlier this year with Musk’s xAI, which includes Grok and X.
Even the big banks are talking IPOs, though in their characteristically guarded way.
“At the end of the day, equity markets have been extremely resilient and if that resilience continues, I do think you see IPO activity accelerate again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on the bank’s earnings call Monday.
“There are some very large IPOs that are lined up,” Solomon said, adding “they are also less sensitive to…short-term geopolitical trends.”
On Morgan Stanley’s earnings call Wednesday, CEO Ted Pick said “not every company is going to be able to make it as an IPO in this environment,” and that the bar is “very high” for investors.
Maybe the more relevant question now, though, is whether it’s already too late to invest in SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic at all. Each has had an enormous run-up in its valuation during private rounds of financing.
There are a handful of closed-end funds, mutual funds and ETFs from top investment firms that offer pre-IPO access, including Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, Robinhood, and Baron Capital. But many of these funds have whipsawed this year.
“If you’re a retail IPO investor, you have to ask if the juice has already been squeezed,” said David Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Open VC, which helped create the NYSE OPEN Venture Capital Unicorn Index, a tracker of 50 large private companies.
So, OK, the IPO window is opening wider as the weather warms up. Do you look through it? Or climb outside to play?
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
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