Since our June 3 coverage of the SpaceX IPO and the Jefferies short positioning, the broader picture of the 2026 AI IPO wave has sharpened considerably. The three major players are moving toward public markets simultaneously, and the details reveal some uncomfortable truths.

The Numbers First

SpaceX plans to raise up to $75 billion in its upcoming IPO, according to AP News. That would shatter the all-time record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019, when the oil giant raised $26 billion.

SpaceX's current valuation sits at $1.25 trillion — up from $800 billion last year — after Elon Musk engineered a February merger between SpaceX and his AI company xAI.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, is now valued at $965 billion. That's a company that didn't exist until 2021, when a group of ex-OpenAI employees broke off and started it.

OpenAI, the third major player, is preparing its own path to public markets. SoftBank has already put $60 billion behind it, as we covered June 4.

Losing Money at Industrial Scale

AP News reported something most mainstream coverage buried: these companies are losing billions.

SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, according to a May regulatory filing. xAI — the Grok chatbot company Musk forced SpaceX to acquire — lost $6.4 billion in operations last year, according to a company document obtained by AP.

The xAI acquisition is its own scandal. Musk was a controlling shareholder in BOTH SpaceX and xAI when he pushed SpaceX to buy xAI. Some SpaceX investors called it a bailout. Some called it unethical. They weren't wrong on either count. The deal went through anyway.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

The AP write-up by Barbara Ortutay is fair on the numbers but buries the conflict-of-interest problem with the SpaceX-xAI merger. One sentence. Then it moves on.

The real story is that public investors are being asked to buy into a combined entity where the founder already engineered a self-dealing transaction BEFORE the IPO. If that happened at a Fortune 500 company, the SEC would be asking questions. Because it's Musk, it's treated as a quirky footnote.

Morningstar's Michael Field is the only analyst quoted who puts it plainly: "These companies are now burning through cash to win the AI race, and public equity is the cheapest source available, particularly in a rising interest rate environment."

Public equity is the cheapest source available. Translation: they're coming to retail investors because institutional money has limits. Retail investors are the exit liquidity.

The Bubble Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Anthropic's $965 billion valuation is for a company that was a "little-known research laboratory" three years ago, according to AP News. It has the Claude chatbot. That's the product.

SpaceX is valued at $1.25 trillion and is losing $2.6 billion a year from operations — BEFORE absorbing xAI's $6.4 billion in losses.

OpenAI has SoftBank so deep in it — $60 billion — that SoftBank insiders are reportedly nervous, as we covered this week.

Morningstar has already said SpaceX is worth less than half its IPO target valuation. Jefferies is reportedly positioning to short it. These aren't random pessimists. These are professional money managers doing math.

The Meritocracy Question

The AI race is being funded by a bet that one company wins everything. The assumption baked into these valuations is that AGI — artificial general intelligence that surpasses humans — is coming, and whoever gets there first captures all the value.

That may be true. It may not be. The assumption isn't provable, and it's being treated as fact.

What we know: SpaceX is burning cash, xAI was acquired in a deal that smelled like self-dealing, Anthropic is a three-year-old startup valued near a trillion dollars, and ordinary Americans are being invited to buy shares in all of it.

What It Means for Regular People

If you're a retail investor looking at the SpaceX IPO on June 12, you need to know three things.

One: The company is losing money. Not a little. Billions.

Two: The founder already did a deal before the IPO that his own investors called a bailout.

Three: The most credible independent valuation — Morningstar's — says the company is worth less than half what they're asking you to pay.

This doesn't mean it's a bad investment. Amazon lost money for years. So did Tesla. But those companies had clear paths to revenue. The AI companies going public in 2026 are betting on technology that hasn't fully proven what it can do yet.

Buy if you want. But go in with your eyes open. The house always knows more than the buyer at an IPO. Always.