OpenAI saw SpaceX lose $800 billion in market cap in ten days and said we can wait until 2027.

In public, the company has not framed it that way. But that is what happened.

OpenAI has been hinting at a late-year IPO since most of 2026. The company submitted an S-1 with the SEC on June 8 under confidential conditions. Sam Altman has been telling people that it's coming. The investment banks had teams lined up. Then, on June 12, SpaceX went public at $135 a share and briefly spiked to $225 in under a week before giving back 30% over the following ten days. The biggest selling of a company in history had become the most volatile large-cap Nasdaq stock within a handful of sessions.

Just recently, the New York Times reported that OpenAI is now leaning towards pushing its listing back until 2027. The paper cited three people familiar with the company's internal deliberations. Reuters confirmed the same. Internally CFO Sarah Friar been making the case for 2027 for weeks since now the market just handed her an argument as powerful as any she could ever ask for.

Altman won't budge on the number

The issue is simple. OpenAI is eager to go public, pricing at $1 trillion. Its most recent funding round it valued the company between $730 billion and $852 billion. In order to close that gap you either need a phenomenally receptive public market or you need revenue growth that does the lifting organically.

Advisers offered Altman a choice: wait for the $1 trillion environment to emerge by 2027, or settle for less and list this year. The second option was ruled out by Altman as a non-starter. He is not going to take the company public at a discount when he has his own notion of what it takes to value it, and honestly that's pretty standard founder positioning. Whether the market gets there before the company exhausts its runway to cash is another question!

It has run through $2 billion a month in revenue. The catch is that expenditures are outpacing it. OpenAI is spending on compute infrastructure until 2030: a whopping $600 billion. The company comes up have missed its internal revenue goals earlier this quarter, reported the Wall Street Journal. This argument for Friar waiting is partially about when he's financially ready.

Whenever a company is public, they have to open their books on every quarter and defend their numbers in real time. OpenAI is still in the process of building this infrastructure which will drive margins capable of supporting a trillion-dollar valuation. Better incorporated as a private company, harder to do that as a public company under the microscope.

How SpaceX altered the calculus

At first glance, the timing of the SpaceX retracement is less critical than it might seem. OpenAI and Anthropic have been racing to define the shape of the AI IPO. According to the WSJ, bankers have told both companies that the first one to list gets to dictate the rules of how investors will price the entire sector. It felt like they had a strong case for going first at the time that SpaceX were worth $225.

That argument is much tougher to make when the hero trades for $153, retail investors that paid up for SpaceX are seeing paper losses stack up. That weighs down their enthusiasm for the next big AI IPO. Advisers had also suggested that retail fervor might be significantly stoked at this moment, and Altman does not control the fate of such fervor.

What it means for Anthropic

With OpenAI backing off towards 2027, Anthropic is getting the sort of prize it's been trying to build through months of its existence: first-mover advantage in the AI IPO market.

After submitting its confidential S-1 on June 1, Anthropic aims for an October 2026 debut with $965 billion valuation led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. While Biden signed a law aimed at making sure the supercomputers powering these massive models don't close supply chains later in June, Trump's position on Anthropic softened the same day, eliminating what had been hanging over the company since earlier in the year when Pentagon classified it as "supply chain risk." Six months ago, the path was much messier.

If OpenAI waits until 2027, Anthropic defines the price, the narrative, and firewalled every AI IPO that comes after it. The bankers reckon that whichever group is the first to list gets to set the industry. Now, Anthropic is ready to be that company.

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