Of the three filings, only SpaceX's has a price — and as of Wednesday's amended filing, an unusually exact one: $135 a share, 555.6 million shares, a $75 billion raise at $1.77 trillion, on $18.67bn of 2025 revenue and a $4.94bn net loss. Mr Musk — henceforth, in these pages, the trillion-dollar tinkerer — retains more than 82% of the voting control after the offering.5 The alternative ticker MUSK was, per a person familiar, "discussed" and "rejected"; the filed ticker is SPCX. The reasons for rejection were not, at filing, supplied.
The amended filing also notes, in passing, that the xAI unit bought $269 million of Tesla megapacks in April, and that Tesla holds 18.99 million SpaceX shares — worth $2.56 billion at the fixed price. "We have historically collaborated with Tesla through commercial, licensing, and support agreements," the filing says. Historically.
Anthropic filed two weeks earlier with the tonal restraint of a librarian filing a tax return. The company — henceforth the quiet filer — raised $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. It has not named its bankers. It has not named its timing. It has, however, committed to $100 billion of AWS spending over ten years — a figure that exceeds IBM's total cloud revenue over the same period.6 The compute partner is not, in this arrangement, an arm's-length supplier. It is, structurally, a co-issuer of the equity, without sitting on the cap table.
OpenAI's filing, announced openly on Monday, contained no timing. "We have not decided on timing yet," its statement read — making OpenAI, in these pages, the present-perfect filer. On CNBC days earlier, Mr Altman had called going public "a financing event." The present perfect is the tense one uses to describe something that has not yet been done but may, at some indeterminate point, be done.7
The stakes, for the reader. At $1.77tn, SPCX debuted on 12 June as the seventh-largest company in the United States — above Tesla, at roughly $1.6tn, which is, awkwardly, also Mr Musk's. It will not, however, join the S&P 500 on debut, or soon: that index requires four consecutive quarters of positive earnings, and the filing reports a $4.94bn net loss. The forced buying arrives by two other doors. The Nasdaq-100 — the index behind the QQQ funds held in a great many retirement accounts — admits new constituents on a mechanical schedule, within roughly fifteen trading days, earnings or no earnings. And the offering reserves a double-digit percentage of its shares for retail investors directly, against a recent norm of 5% or less. Anthropic and OpenAI, if they follow at their rumoured marks, will arrive by the same doors. The public — meaning the reader's pension, or the reader's brokerage account — is not being asked, in any of these cases, whether it wants to own equity at 95× sales in a company whose founder retains more than 82% of the vote. It will own it regardless.8
