The Great IPO Frenzy of 2026

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:05)
This year, Wall Street is going to see three of the biggest IPOs of all time. SpaceX broke records on Friday.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
A huge headline today, the biggest IPO in history.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:20)
At the closing bell, SpaceX is now worth over $2 trillion, that's with a T.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:26)
And Anthropic and OpenAI are both set to go public at enormous valuations later this year.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:32)
OpenAI filing to go public about a week after its biggest competitor, Anthropic, did the same thing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has filed to go public, setting it up to be one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:46)
OpenAI has filed to go public in a blockbuster IPO that could value the ChatGPT creator at more than $1 trillion.

**Spencer Jakab** (0:54)
By some measures, this is the biggest year ever for IPOs.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:58)
Our colleague Spencer Jakab writes an investing column.

**Spencer Jakab** (1:01)
As a matter of fact, just the one for SpaceX exceeds basically all of the IPOs that happened during the year 2000, just to give you some perspective. So it's a lot of money being raised.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:17)
Why is it happening now? What's in the water in 2026?

**Spencer Jakab** (1:21)
Well, what's happening is that we've reached or maybe even passed peak excitement over AI.
A lot of real money is being sunk into this technology and a lot of hope is riding on it. I mean, you want to raise as much money as you can when people are willing to pay you a lot of money for something.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:40)
And how unusual is it to see so many huge IPOs all in one year?

**Spencer Jakab** (1:46)
It's something that we've never seen before. I mean, if you look at SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, assuming all three of those happened this year, plus there are some others, it's going to be a record year in terms of dollars raised. It exceeds anything that we've seen before.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:05)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, June 15th.
Coming up on the show, the great IPO frenzy of 2026

**SPEAKER_7** (2:31)
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**SPEAKER_9** (3:40)
I just bought 50 shares of SpaceX at 172 per share, and I'm never selling.

**SPEAKER_10** (3:47)
I would not bet against an Elon when it comes to SpaceX.

**SPEAKER_11** (3:52)
I'm buying $5,000 worth of shares, and we're along for the ride.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:57)
I would put my money in one place and one place only.

**SPEAKER_9** (4:00)
That is Elon Musk and the SpaceX play.

**SPEAKER_10** (4:02)
This is it.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:03)
The hype going into SpaceX's IPO was wild. Investors seemed excited about the vision founder Elon Musk has for the company, a future that would see AI data centers in orbit, and a human colony on Mars.
By the end of the day Friday, it seemed clear that that excitement had translated into a successful IPO.

**Spencer Jakab** (4:23)
In terms of its debut, the IPO did live up to the hype.
It is the largest IPO ever. It traded up. The company was, at various points of the day, worth more than $2 trillion. It has moved between being the sixth or seventh most valuable company in the United States, or seventh or eighth in the world. So far, it gets an A or an A plus. The stock traded higher. So the good reception for SpaceX bodes well so far for those other AI-related IPOs.

**Jessica Mendoza** (5:03)
Other AI-related IPOs, meaning OpenAI and Anthropic. Like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic have been raising big money from private investors for a while. But they plan to turn on the taps even more by going public as soon as this fall. What's not yet clear is which of the two companies will IPO first.