Six months ago, watching SpaceX and other private companies' valuations spike overnight was something retail traders could only read about from the outside, a headline about an IPO or funding round they'd never get a piece of.
Then SpaceX went public in June and blew past every IPO in history in a single trading session.
Now the same conversation is happening again, except this time the number being floated for Anthropic isn't just large, it's specifically being framed as large enough to beat the record SpaceX just set.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share, selling 555,555,555 shares to raise $75 billion, officially the largest initial public offering in history, easily surpassing Saudi Aramco's previous record of roughly $25 billion set in 2019, as outlined in SpaceX's official pricing announcement.
The stock began trading on June 12, 2026 under the ticker SPCX, opening at $150 and climbing as high as roughly $161.75 in early trading, a nearly 20% pop from the offer price. That close briefly valued the company above $2.1 trillion, putting Elon Musk ahead of Tesla in market capitalization terms and making him, on paper, the world's first trillionaire. Unlike a typical listing dominated by institutional allocations, SpaceX reserved roughly 30% of shares specifically for retail investors, and the order book came in more than two times oversubscribed, with roughly $150 billion in demand chasing a $75 billion raise.
I think this is the part of the SpaceX story that gets glossed over once the record-breaking headlines fade, and it's genuinely important context for anyone measuring Anthropic against the same benchmark. SpaceX stock spent weeks trading below its own $135 IPO price following the initial pop, at one point falling as low as $108.27, before finally closing back above the IPO price for the first time since mid-July. As of the most recent trading session, SPCX sits around $140, still well below its post-debut high, even after the company posted a strong first earnings report as a public company, with Q2 revenue surging 92% year over year to $7.8 billion.
I think that trajectory matters enormously for how you should read any comparison to Anthropic. SpaceX proved that public markets would pay an enormous premium for a category-defining company at a scale nobody had seen before. It also proved, just as clearly, that the same markets will mark a stock right back down toward earth once the initial excitement meets an actual earnings report and ordinary trading conditions.
Here's where I think it's important to separate confirmed fact from investor speculation, because the two are getting blended together in a lot of the coverage right now. Anthropic confirmed directly that it confidentiality submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC on June 1, 2026, for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock.
Critically, Anthropic's own statement is explicit about what it doesn't confirm: the number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set, and the company stated plainly that any proposed offering will depend on market conditions and other factors. That confidential filing came less than a week after Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, up sharply from a $380 billion valuation in an earlier round just months before.
This is genuinely the most important distinction in this entire story, and I don't think it's being made clearly enough elsewhere. The $2 trillion figure being discussed isn't something Anthropic has stated, guided toward, or confirmed in any official capacity. It originates from roughly six Anthropic investors who told reporters they expect a potential October IPO to value the company above $2 trillion, based on projections of $100 billion to $120 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, up from a company-confirmed $47 billion annualized run rate as of May.
I think it's worth being precise about the math underlying that number too, because it doesn't hold together as neatly as the headline figure suggests. At Anthropic's current gross margins, roughly 40%, $120 billion in revenue would produce gross profit consistent with something closer to a $1.5 trillion valuation using standard software multiples, not $2 trillion. The higher figure only really works if Anthropic hits its own stated target of reaching 77% gross margins by 2028, a genuinely steep improvement from where the company sits today, especially given it's spending roughly $19 billion on compute in 2026 alone, nearly a dollar of hardware cost for every dollar of revenue coming in.
Comparing the two directly, the similarities are real but so are the structural differences. Both companies are pursuing Nasdaq listings guided by some of the same top-tier banks, and both represent a wave of private mega-companies choosing to go public specifically because their valuations had grown too large for the private markets to comfortably absorb alone. SpaceX had the advantage of tangible, decades-old infrastructure, actual rockets, an operational satellite network, and real government contracts, backing its valuation. Anthropic's case rests almost entirely on the pace of its revenue growth, reportedly compounding at roughly 10x annually for three consecutive years, a trajectory the company itself has described as unprecedented for enterprise software at this scale, but one that's also inherently more fragile and dependent on continued explosive demand holding up.
I think the honest reading here is that Anthropic's backers are explicitly using SpaceX's record as the benchmark to beat, and openly framing October's potential listing as an opportunity to set a new one. Whether the public market actually agrees with that framing once trading opens is a genuinely separate question, and SpaceX's own choppy post-IPO ride, from a $2.1 trillion peak down toward $108 and back, is the clearest evidence available right now for just how quickly that kind of enthusiasm can cool once a stock actually has to trade on fundamentals rather than anticipation.
For SpaceX, the story going forward is about whether its business can actually grow into the valuation the market assigned it in a single euphoric trading session, something its recent earnings beat suggests is at least plausible, even if the stock hasn't fully reflected that yet.
For Anthropic, the next real milestone is whether its confidential S-1 review with the SEC progresses toward an actual public prospectus, and whether the company itself, rather than its investors speaking to reporters, ever confirms a specific valuation target or listing date. Until Anthropic makes an official statement beyond its June filing announcement, every number attached to its potential IPO, including the $2 trillion figure driving this entire comparison, remains investor speculation rather than company guidance, and that distinction is worth keeping firmly in mind for anyone trying to decide whether history is genuinely about to repeat itself.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
