The Same Five Firms.

The SpaceX roadshow opened in midtown on Wednesday, 4 June. The lead presentation lasted fifty-seven minutes. The CFO, Bret Johnsen, took questions. The questions, per a person in the room, were “polite.” The price on the screen was $135 a share — fixed, no range; demand sensitivity is, evidently, for other people. At $135, the valuation is $1.77 trillion, and the implied price-to-sales multiple, on $18.67bn of 2025 revenue, is 95×.

This is what the IPO class of June ‘26 looks like from the bankers’ side: three deals, five firms, no daylight. Goldman Sachs leads the SpaceX ticket; Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase complete it, per the amended filing of 3 June. Anthropic and OpenAI have not named their syndicates. We are told, off the record, by a person in proximity to a person in proximity to a deal, that “the firms are talking.” We have been told this every fortnight since November.

When the same five firms underwrite every deal at every valuation, the pricing discipline that distinguishes a $400bn float from a $1.4tn float is structurally absent. This is not a moral claim. It is an arithmetic one. Five firms splitting the underwriting on $2.84 trillion of paper, even at an all-in 1%, is $28 billion in fees. The marginal value of a no, on this math, is negative. Continued on page 5. →

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. 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. 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.

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.

Footnotes

1. The slide-count is per a person in the room at the SpaceX roadshow opening, 4 June. The deck has not been publicly released; Compute! has not seen it. The reported count of dual-class references — zero — is, by definition, easier to verify.
2. Morgan Stanley led Yahoo!‘s 1996 IPO and is, per the amended filing of 3 June, the second name on SpaceX’s ticket, behind Goldman Sachs. The intervening Yahoo! P/S compression — from a peak above 80× in early 2000 to roughly 1× at acquisition by Verizon in 2017 — is not, on a quick read of the prospectus, referenced in SpaceX’s filing.
3. The source asked not to be identified. The source has been not-identified by us, fortnightly, since November.
4. Underwriting fees on a $75bn raise at 1.5–3% imply $1.1bn–$2.25bn for the SpaceX deal alone. The all-in fee pool across the three filings, on conservative assumptions, exceeds $5 billion. This is, on the bankers’ published league tables, a footnote.
5. Per the amended filing of 3 June: 555.6 million shares at a fixed $135 (a $75bn raise), an underwriters’ option for 83.33 million more ($11.2bn), “over 82%” voting control retained by Mr Musk, and up to 5% of the stock reserved for a direct share program for “certain employees and persons.” The persons are not named.
6. IBM’s segmented cloud revenue (Red Hat + IBM Cloud) ran approximately $25bn annually in 2024–25. The ten-year extrapolation is Compute!‘s; the comparison is mechanical.
7. OpenAI’s confidential-S-1 announcement (8 June 2026) stated “we have not decided on timing yet.” Separately, Sam Altman told CNBC Power Lunch (1 June 2026) that going public was “a financing event” not one “we’re focused on the timing of.”
8. S&P 500 index inclusion rules require a U.S. domicile, positive earnings over the most recent four quarters, and a public float of at least 50%. SPCX, per the prospectus, meets one of three. The rules have, on past evidence, proved flexible. The Nasdaq-100, by contrast, screens on size and liquidity, not earnings, and adds qualifying new listings on a roughly fifteen-trading-day schedule. The double-digit retail allocation — against a recent norm of 5% or less — and the Nasdaq-100 timing are per Jay Ritter, University of Florida, as reported by Jeff Sommer, The New York Times, 13 June 2026.
9. On the All-In podcast (June 2026), Ms Friar called compute “a very scarce resource at the moment” and said “there’s just not enough tokens available.”

The Receipts

Every quote above is real — every source below is where it was said.

1. TechCrunch, “OpenAI confidentially files draft S-1” · 8 June 2026.
2. Reuters, “SpaceX files for IPO at $1.75 trillion valuation” · 20 May 2026.
3. CNBC, “SpaceX targets $135 IPO price at valuation of $1.77 trillion” · 3 June 2026 · 555.6m shares; over 82% voting control; Goldman Sachs lead banker; xAI bought $269m of Tesla megapacks; Tesla holds 18.99m SpaceX shares.
4. Aggregate of S-1 filings and The Information reporting · 1 May – 8 June 2026.
5. SpaceX S-1 · 20 May 2026 · 2025 revenue $18.67bn, net loss $4.94bn.
6. Yahoo! historical price-to-sales, 1999–2000 peak — public records.
7. Reuters, “SpaceX roadshow opens; expected debut 12 June” · 4 June 2026.
8. The Information, “Anthropic closes $65bn round at $965bn post” · May 2026.
9. CNBC, Altman interview · 8 June 2026.
10. The Information, OpenAI investor letters · multiple, 2024–2026.
11. The Information, OpenAI adjusted gross margin 40% (2024) → 33% (2025) · 2026 (Sacra, secondary).
12. Reuters, “Anthropic and AWS expand partnership: 5GW, $100bn over 10 years” · 20 April 2026.
13. The Information, “Databricks in talks at $165–175bn valuation” · 9 June 2026.
14. Forge Global, Cerebras IPO data (CBRS, 14 May 2026) — flagged unconfirmed by Reuters at filing.
15. Reuters, “Meta to pay $14.8B for 49% of Scale AI” · June 2025.
16. The New York Times, Jeff Sommer, “Mega I.P.O. Frenzy Could Be a Harbinger of a Stock Bubble” · 13 June 2026 · retail allocation; the 40×-sales three-year underperformance finding (Jay Ritter, University of Florida).
17. Bloomberg, “BofA Warns It’s Time to ‘Take Profits’ as Red Flags Multiply” · 5 June 2026 · Savita Subramanian; 70% of bear-market signposts triggered.