Posts Tagged IPO

Renaissance Capital counts three sizable US IPOs postponed before pricing in the third quarter, all within a few weeks of each other in September: Oura, Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance. Postponements are usually read as a verdict on the market. The more useful thing to look at is who was selling. Holtec offered 50 million shares at $15 to $18, all of them sold by the company and none by existing holders, and asked the SEC on 25 September to withdraw its registration. Bamboo offered 35 million at $18 to $20, none sold by the company and all of them by existing holders. Oura offered 50 million at $40 to $44, of which 13.5 million were to come from the company and 36.5 million from existing holders. All three were profitable on the figures in their filings. As of 7 October, neither Bamboo nor Oura had filed to withdraw. The seller column is the part of these deals that gets read last and says the most.

On 28 September Reuters reported that two customers accounted for nearly a quarter of Anthropic's revenue in 2025. The reporting that followed points at something larger. Anthropic's filing is still confidential, and a search of SEC EDGAR on 5 October found no public registration statement, but Reuters, which has seen it, reports the share of revenue sold through Amazon and Google rising from 11% in 2023 to 32% in 2024 and 47% in 2025, about $2.16 billion, through their cloud marketplaces. The reading here is that the larger concentration is the channel rather than the customer list. Nearly half of last year's revenue arrived through two marketplaces, and the companies that own them are, by Reuters' account of the filing, also Anthropic's investors, its compute suppliers, its competitors and its customers. Reuters still does not name the two customers who each generated 12% of revenue in 2025, and this piece does not guess. If either of them is one of those same two companies, the two concentrations fall on the same names and add up to more than either figure shows on its own.

On 21 April, SpaceX ended seven years of financial silence. For the first time the company disclosed actual numbers publicly. The Analyst Day sessions at Starbase, together with the simultaneous release of the IPO prospectus, gave investors a first look at the financial shape of the business. The headline is Starlink. The combined launch and Starlink businesses generated $15 billion to $16 billion in revenue in 2025, with profits of approximately $8 billion. Starlink alone ended 2025 with roughly 9.2 million subscribers and over $10 billion in revenue. That is a business with disclosed unit economics rather than a projection, and it is the first time those figures have been public. Analysts project Starlink revenue reaching $24 billion by the end of 2026, which is a projection rather than a disclosure. Starlink passed 10 million active subscribers globally in early 2026, adding customers faster than any telecom network has. SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026 in an all-stock transaction valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, with xAI at approximately $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion at the time. The xAI numbers remain the opaque part. Grok's monetization, compute costs and the capital committed to AI infrastructure have not been fully broken out, and that is what the full S-1 still needs to provide. The governance structure is now confirmed. Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX's equity and controls roughly 79% of the votes through super-voting shares. Public investors will hold standard voting shares. This is a founder-controlled company at the ballot box regardless of how many shares trade on Nasdaq.

Six days ago these pages argued that SpaceX's Analyst Day on 21 April was the most consequential scheduled event of the month for anyone trying to understand where this listing is headed. It happens tomorrow, and several things have changed since. When the 14 April piece was written, the working target was $1.75 trillion. That figure has since been revised upward, and SpaceX is reported to be testing a valuation above $2 trillion in conversations with prospective investors. At that level the company would list at a valuation no company has carried from its first day of trading. The questions Analyst Day needs to answer have become correspondingly harder. At $2 trillion, SpaceX would trade at roughly 125 times 2025 revenue. What management says tomorrow about Starlink's subscriber economics, the xAI merger's contribution and Starship's commercial timeline has to support a number with no public market comparable. Reported valuation targets in advance of a filing are expectations rather than prices, and they move.

On 1 April, SpaceX confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC. A June Nasdaq listing, a targeted $1.75 trillion valuation and up to $75 billion to raise, which would be more than two and a half times the largest US IPO on record. Those figures are reported rather than confirmed, and a confidential filing is an option to list rather than a listing. What the filing settles is less whether than when, and the question worth asking alongside it is who is structurally positioned when it happens. An IPO is not the beginning of the story. It is often closer to the end. When SpaceX goes public, three groups will hold exposure to the event. The first group, private equity holders, have been in for years. They have the lowest cost basis and the largest unrealized gain on paper, and they are subject to a 180-day lock-up from the date of listing. They cannot sell into the public market during the period of peak post-listing enthusiasm. By the time they can, the initial enthusiasm has typically faded and insider supply is weighing on the price. Their gain is real. The window they are excluded from is often the most active one. The second group, buyers on the day, get access at the listing price. That sounds attractive until oversubscription is considered. Circle's listing in June 2025 was twenty-five times oversubscribed, and Robinhood allocated retail investors roughly 11% of what they requested. Effective position sizes are small, and the outcome is timing-dependent in both directions: sell early and the position was a short-term trade, hold long and post-lock-up selling pressure from the first group erodes the gain. The third group are T-SpaceX holders. T-SpaceX is structured as a loan participation right trading on a decentralized exchange on Solana. Because it is not an equity instrument, its holders are not subject to the 180-day lock-up governing the underlying shares. Circle's trajectory illustrates what that asymmetry meant in one case. The stock listed at $31, rose to nearly $299 within three weeks, and had round-tripped almost entirely to its opening price by the time the lock-up expired six months later. The most active window was narrow, roughly three to six weeks, and it was structurally inaccessible to private equity holders. Buyers on the day who caught it held small positions. T-SpaceX holders face neither constraint. They entered at a pre-IPO price, they hold a token that trades continuously, and they face no lock-up. That combination, pre-IPO entry pricing with unconstrained post-listing liquidity, has not historically been available to any single investor class. Two limits belong on that. Continuous tradability describes what the instrument permits rather than what any market will offer, and a token that can be sold still requires somebody willing to buy it. And T-Tokens are not available in the US or other restricted territories.

When SpaceX files for its IPO, three groups of people will hold exposure to one of the most anticipated liquidity events in a generation. Only one of them is structurally positioned to act at the moment of peak liquidity. The other two are constrained, and in one case the constraint is contractual and absolute. Circle's recent listing serves as a live case study. Circle went public on 5 June 2025 at $31 per share. The deal was twenty-five times oversubscribed, and retail investors on Robinhood received roughly 11% of what they requested. By late June, barely three weeks later, the stock had reached nearly $299. Then the 180-day lock-up clock began. When that period expired in December 2025, the stock had round-tripped almost entirely to its opening price. The June window of liquidity and price discovery had closed, and anyone excluded from it missed it entirely. This is not specific to Circle. It is the shape of a great many high-profile listings.

SpaceX is filing its IPO prospectus this week, targeting a June 2026 listing. Reports place the fundraise at over $75 billion, with a projected valuation above $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest public market debut on record. Those figures are reported rather than confirmed, and a projected valuation ahead of a filing is an expectation rather than a price. When it lists, institutional allocations will be carved out in the usual way, a public float will follow, and retail investors will be able to buy shares on an exchange. That is the standard process. What is less standard is the structure that existed before any of it, and since the filing marks the end of the pre-IPO period for this particular company, it is a reasonable moment to set out how that structure works. In February 2026, Tessera launched T-SpaceX on Solana, a token representing a loan participation right with economic exposure linked to SpaceX valuations. It was distributed through Meteora's Alpha Vault and DLMM and raised $279,000, and it was accessible to wallet holders without an accredited investor requirement, subject to the territorial restrictions that apply to all T-Tokens. The legal structure is a Cayman Islands SPC with a segregated portfolio holding the exposure through a participation agreement. The token carries a non-security legal opinion, on the basis that it is a participation right in a loan rather than a direct equity instrument. That distinction is what makes permissionless distribution viable in the jurisdictions where the opinion applies, and it is worth repeating that a legal opinion binds no regulator. On the infrastructure side, Chainlink Proof of Reserve provides on-chain verification that token supply matches the assets held in the portfolio, and Fireblocks MPC handles issuance, transfers and key management. The combination of a documented legal wrapper, on-chain reserve verification and institutional-grade token security is what distinguishes this from earlier attempts at private equity tokenization.

On 12 September the chief executive of Anthropic published an essay arguing that the industry should slow the rate at which it improves model capabilities. The heads of OpenAI, xAI and Google DeepMind all responded in public within a day, and the coverage has treated that as three rivals agreeing. Agreement on the direction is not agreement on the mechanism, and on the mechanism they do not agree. This piece does not judge whether the argument is right. It examines the first of the three proposed steps, because that step is a disclosure mechanism, and disclosure mechanisms are readable from here. Each frontier company would give ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators, covering not just finished models but training pipelines and processes. Strip the subject matter away and the shape is familiar. This is a proposal to install an independent party inside the building, with standing access and the right to publish what it finds.

SpaceX’s first major post-IPO lock-up release offered a useful test of how these events actually behave. Ahead of the 6 August release, 3 claims were on the table: the conditional 455.8 million-share tranche would remain locked, eligibility to sell would not necessarily mean actual selling, and an expanding free float could create additional passive demand alongside new supply. The conditional tranche did fail its price test, leaving 911.5 million shares eligible for release. SpaceX’s free float then jumped from roughly 4.9% to 11.8%. But instead of collapsing under the new supply, the stock rose 6.1% on release day and closed at $133.11 the following session, up another 15.83%. Two of the 3 predictions held. The third was never actually tested. The bigger lesson is that a lock-up expiry is more complicated than “more shares = more selling.” Eligibility, actual selling, float mechanics, and market demand are separate forces, and the SpaceX release showed why that distinction matters.

Since its June 12 IPO, SpaceX has completed a full round trip, pricing at $135, surging above $225 within days, and now trading below its offer price. The debate is no longer about what SpaceX was worth as a private company. The market is trying to determine what kind of public company it is becoming. One increasingly useful way to think about SpaceX is as an emerging hyperscaler. It may not follow the path of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, but its combination of launch infrastructure, Starlink, and AI compute is creating a business model that looks increasingly familiar, while pointing toward a very different destination.