The AI Chart Everyone Is Getting Wrong

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, the shift from token maxing to token panic happened so quickly, I'm going to explain why things are a lot different than a lot of the charts and analysis running around would make you think. Before that, in the headlines, a preview of the upcoming SpaceX IPO. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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And while you're there, check out the rest, send me ideas. We're going to be adding a lot here. For now though, let's talk about the first big AI IPO of the year.
We have a bit of an exciting Friday today. After months of anticipation, SpaceX is conducting the largest IPO in history. Now, this has been one of the most hyped up events in markets for a very long time. Investment banks have been battling it out for institutional sales and the retail frenzy is already off the charts. As of close of trading on Thursday, Bloomberg reports that retail investors submitted more than $100 billion in orders. Yes, that is a billion with a B. Now, SpaceX was only selling $75 billion worth of stock and reportedly reduced the retail allocation from 30 percent to 20 percent. That means the retail allocation was almost 7x oversubscribed and would have been enough to fill the entire IPO by itself. The sale was priced at $135 per share, a flat price set by SpaceX earlier in the process. That pricing implies a valuation just shy of $1.8 billion, meaning the company will debut as the seventh largest company in the world, ahead of Saudi Aramco, Tesla, and Meta. Some anticipate the flat pricing will increase day one volatility, as there was no price discovery mechanism in the IPO process. Much of the commentary has already declared this a retail bloodbath waiting to happen, and possibly an obvious market top for the AI bull run. A rare opinion piece for Reuters declared, There is a serious risk that investors piling into the world's largest IPO will get burned, especially the retail crowd. The analysis focused on the relative lack of revenue for a company of this size. Their 2025 financials showed a $5 billion loss on $18.7 billion in revenue. In contrast, Meta delivered $200 billion in revenue last year, and even a Tesla that isn't at the top of its game managed $95 billion. Even after SpaceX signed Megadata Center deals with Anthropic and Google over the past month, they're well short of revenue numbers that put them up alongside those other companies. There also has been criticism around the way the company was marketed, with Goldman Sachs simultaneously conducting the IPO and providing wildly bullish research analysis. In a report last week, they forecast that SpaceX could hit $474 billion in revenue by 2030, with their AI division growing a hundred-fold. To some, this was less about plausibility and more about an analyst with a clear incentive forecasting a bajillion dollars in revenue. There is also the sideshow of Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world's first trillionaire. Based on Bloomberg's net worth calculations, Elon was worth just shy of $700 billion last month, with more than 60% of his wealth tied up in SpaceX. The IPO pricing would bring his net worth to $971 billion, so any significant pop would push him over the line. Now, many expect the IPO to be a bit of a circus, but one of the big questions is what will the implications be for the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs to come? Some are seeing this as the first chance the US market has to price an AI model company, meaning that if SpaceX does well, it could imply even greater valuations for the Frontier Labs. Then again, there's also the potential with that line of thinking that SpaceX puts in the market top, theoretically making it more difficult for OpenAI and Anthropic to get their IPOs at the door at a premium valuation. I tend to disagree with this as the right way to look at things. Two big reasons why. The first is the simple one. You can't really apply anything around Elon Musk to anyone else. Love him or loathe him, he kind of operates in his own vortex, and I don't necessarily think that people are going to read this as a referendum on AI models as much as a pricing on the Elon market halo.