As markets open Friday morning, Elon Musk-owned SpaceX is poised to become the biggest new addition to the stock market — ever. The company, which also owns X — the social media cesspool formerly known as Twitter — and xAI, set an initial share price of $135. That places the corporation’s overall valuation at $1.77 trillion. If the Securities and Exchange Commission approves confidential filings made earlier this year, SpaceX’s massive initial public offering could be followed by IPOs from two other tech giants: OpenAI, valued at more than $850 billion, and Anthropic, valued at more than $960 billion.
All three tech firms are taking steps to go public amid a high-stakes race to control the burgeoning artificial intelligence market. At the same time, questions abound about the hype surrounding AI, its safety issues and pacpotential profitability. This means those dreaming of getting rich with SpaceX’s IPO or any other tech titans should keep in mind: For all the resources Silicon Valley is pouring into these emerging technologies, it’s still possible that predictions of endless growth could turn out to be another LLM-generated hallucination.
For all the resources Silicon Valley is pouring into these emerging technologies, it’s still possible that predictions of endless growth could turn out to be another LLM-generated hallucination.
And should the AI bubble pop, the results for the global economy could be disastrous. In effect, these AI giants are strapping a time bomb to the stock market. If they go down, they might take most of those who went along for the ride down with them.
For months, economists have debated just how much of an effect massive investments in AI infrastructure have had on the U.S. economy. Regardless of its actual effect on GDP, investors have bet big on Big Tech, helping propel the major stock market indexes to record heights. Notably, that stock market boom hasn’t included the companies behind the large language models most widely used: Grok (SpaceX), ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic). So far, those firms have relied on investment rounds from venture capital, major institutions such as banks and other private deals to raise funds.
At the same time, many of the companies fueling the AI explosion are also investing in one another. Established multinational corporations such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google are pouring money into purchases from chip manufacturer Nvidia. Nvidia, in turn, has joined those giants in pumping cash into OpenAI and Anthropic, which also purchase Nvidia chips. Musk, meanwhile, used SpaceX to “acquire” xAI from himself, adding a whole new layer to the fiscal ouroboros he’s already fashioned.