What Happened After the Gavel Dropped

The jury verdict is old news. Within 48 hours, the landscape shifted.

SpaceX is moving fast. According to CNBC, the company could disclose its IPO prospectus this week. The target date is June 12 on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, with plans to raise as much as $75 billion — which would make it the largest IPO in Wall Street history.

OpenAI isn't far behind. According to Proactive Investors and Yahoo Finance reporting, OpenAI is targeting a Q4 2026 listing — October or November — at a valuation goal of up to $1 trillion. The raise would be roughly $60 billion. Every previous tech IPO would be left in the dust.

The Numbers Are NOT Normal

OpenAI's valuation targets are staggering. Only two tech companies — Facebook and Alibaba — have ever been valued above $100 billion after their first day of trading on U.S. exchanges, according to CNBC. OpenAI is targeting ten times that.

OpenAI closed a $122 billion private funding round in March 2026 at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia were anchor investors. The company is now pulling in $2 billion in revenue per month and has more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users, according to Proactive Investors.

OpenAI already restructured from a capped-profit entity into a public benefit corporation — completed in late 2025. The structural barrier to a traditional listing has been removed. The company is expected to file confidentially with the SEC this quarter, complete review over the summer, and launch in fall.

The New Attack Line: xAI Is a Liability

Two former OpenAI employees and a coalition of AI safety nonprofits published an open letter to SpaceX investors on Tuesday, warning that xAI represents unpriced risk in the SpaceX offering.

The letter was co-authored by Steven Adler, a former OpenAI safety researcher, and Page Hedley, a former OpenAI policy adviser — both now co-founders of a new nonprofit called Guidelight AI Standards, according to Wired. Other signatories include Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, Encode AI, and The Midas Project.

Hedley told Wired directly that xAI has the worst safety practices "nearly across the board" compared to OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

Their complaints are specific. xAI's Grok chatbot spontaneously injected white genocide content into responses. xAI allowed Grok to generate thousands of sexualized images of women and children before it was caught. xAI has NOT published detailed frameworks for mitigating risks around its models being used in cyberattacks — a baseline industry standard that competitors have met.

The letter also flags something investors should be asking: SpaceX recently struck a deal to sell a significant portion of its GPU capacity to Anthropic — an OpenAI competitor. That deal, per Wired, raises questions about whether xAI is still a frontier AI competitor or just a brand inside a larger holding company with no clear direction.

SpaceX and xAI did NOT respond to Wired's request for comment.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Most outlets are framing this as a clean victory lap for Altman and a loss for Musk. The Guardian called OpenAI's plans "all but guaranteed." CNBC's Gene Munster called the trial "theater" that's now done.

The jury ruling — delivered in under two hours — found only that Musk sued too late, exceeding the three-year statute of limitations. As MIT Technology Review explicitly noted, the verdict did not rule on whether OpenAI violated its nonprofit mission. The judge dismissed on procedural grounds, NOT on the merits.

The Guardian, to its credit, noted that Musk "had little claim to the mantle of champion of AI safety, given his own company's many egregious lapses." The fact that Musk was a poor messenger doesn't eliminate the underlying questions about OpenAI's structure.

Meanwhile, the xAI safety letter is being treated as a niche story by outlets that covered every courthouse sketch from Oakland. A coalition of former insiders warning IPO investors about specific, documented safety failures — including CSAM generation — deserves more attention.

What This Means If You're Not a Billionaire

Both of these IPOs will set records. Both will generate enormous wealth for early investors, employees, and executives. Both involve companies building AI systems that affect hundreds of millions of people daily.

The legal circus is over. Wall Street will now decide if it asks the questions the Oakland courthouse wouldn't answer: Who is actually responsible when these systems fail? What happens when xAI's Grok goes off the rails again and SpaceX shareholders are on the hook? Is OpenAI's $2 billion monthly revenue built on sustainable adoption or hype-fueled trial subscriptions?

Musk and Altman both want your money. The prospectus filings will tell you what they want to tell you. Read the footnotes.