Crypto users who thought they had found a way into the hottest IPO in years through tokenized SpaceX stock discovered on Friday that the shares would not be arriving. Binance Wallet, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet all canceled their tokenized SpaceX offerings after xStocks, the tokenized equity provider behind all three products, failed to deliver the underlying assets. According to CoinDesk, xStocks and its partners had gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders tied to SpaceX access before the mechanism collapsed.

Bybit had launched the earliest campaign on June 7, introducing SpaceX as the first offering on its IPO Express product and telling users they could “participate in the SpaceX IPO subscription using crypto and gain early access before spot trading begins.” Binance Wallet followed with its own SPCXx campaign on Thursday, describing it as a “non-guaranteed subscription process” through xStocks. Bitget Wallet told users on June 9 that they could “access tokenized stock exposure to SpaceX” through the same provider.

When SpaceX actually went public on Friday, none of the crypto allocations materialised. Bybit told users that “due to the xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets,” it had received no allocation and no subscribed SpaceX shares would be issued. The exchange offered automatic refunds plus a reward calculated at 10 per cent APR over a fixed four-day period. Binance canceled its campaign the same day, refunding all locked USDC and promising to distribute $1 million worth of its own bStocks SpaceX tokens equally among participants by June 18.

The scale of the failed allocation was significant. According to The Defiant, Binance’s SPCXx campaign alone attracted $557 million in on-chain subscriptions across nearly 27,700 addresses before being unwound with nothing distributed. Bitget Wallet also announced full refunds for affected users. Community reports indicated that Kraken customers fared somewhat better, with some subscribers receiving roughly four shares’ worth of tokenized SpaceX exposure, far less than requested but more than zero.

The allocation crunch was not entirely unique to crypto. SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO was more than four times oversubscribed, with approximately $250 billion in total demand. Traditional brokerage customers also received fewer shares than they requested, though Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi all completed at least partial allocations for eligible participants. The difference is that crypto customers got nothing at all.

The failure exposed a structural problem with how these products were built. Crypto exchanges did not have direct relationships with SpaceX’s underwriters or the IPO allocation process. Instead, they relied on xStocks as an intermediary to secure and deliver the underlying shares, adding an extra link in the chain between the customer and the asset. When that intermediary could not obtain shares from the massively oversubscribed offering, the entire tokenized product collapsed regardless of how much demand the exchanges had aggregated.

Even crypto industry insiders found the arrangement problematic. Tom Farley, CEO of crypto exchange Bullish, posted on X that “maybe tokens should actually be approved by the issuer and therefore be the actual underlying share.” ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente had flagged the issue earlier on Friday, posting that he had “seen 40 exchanges and wallets advertising SpaceX stock” and asking, “What exactly am I buying?”

Not every tokenized SpaceX product failed. The xStocks SPCXx token did eventually go live after the IPO, and CoinGecko listed tokenized SpaceX products at a combined market capitalisation of nearly $50 million on the first trading day. That figure is barely a rounding error against SpaceX’s roughly $2.1 trillion public valuation. Meanwhile, PreStocks’ Solana-based SpaceX token was trading at a steep discount to the actual public shares, a gap the issuer had warned about due to a six-month lockup on the underlying shares.

The episode arrived as the SEC had already delayed a plan, reported by Bloomberg in May, to allow crypto firms to trade tokenized versions of US stocks. Tokenized equities are being promoted alongside stablecoins as evidence that crypto is finding mainstream adoption, but the SpaceX debacle demonstrated how much of that adoption still depends on centralised issuers, custodians, and allocation pipelines. The original pitch for Bitcoin was to reduce reliance on trusted financial intermediaries. What happened on Friday was a reminder that tokenized stocks, by their nature, cannot escape them.

SpaceX has captured the attention of media, investors, and the public for years now — interest propelled by the company’s reusable rocket launches, the rise of its Starlink satellite network, and of course, for its founder and CEO Elon Musk.

But in its 24-year history, nothing quite compares to this initial public offering. Everyone seems to be interested, and perhaps it’s because of the sheer size of this IPO. The company priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

TechCrunch has followed SpaceX’s start, struggles, and successes from the early days. And we’re here for what happens next too. This article will be continually updated with all of the latest SpaceX IPO news.

The latest on the SpaceX IPO

SpaceX shares opened at $150 on the Nasdaq public exchange, an 11% pop for the most anticipated debut in history. And it has continued to rise. The shares keep rising too (which we will update here). In midday trading, SpaceX shares soared 30%.

There has been heavy trading volume, as expected. Robinhood said it has seen “record-breaking traffic on its trading platform in the hours after SpaceX’s historic public markets debut.

SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell was interviewed by CNBC on Friday and among the many interesting comments she made, here is one that might get the attention of Tesla shareholders. At one point in the interview, Shotwell said a “merger between SpaceX and Tesla might make Elon’s life a little easier.”

How to track the SpaceX IPO

With an offering this large, there is a lot of financial machinery operating behind the scenes — so the first question is just when the stock makes it to the market to start trading. SpaceX is debuting on Nasdaq and you can see the official Nasdaq listing here, which will have the price of record as soon as there is one. Nasdaq also has video of the SpaceX crew ringing the bell, if that’s your thing.

But the price is just part of the picture. For the most up-to-the-minute information, your best bet is still financial press outlets like Bloomberg and CNBC, both of which have liveblogs running and will have close coverage of any hiccups that happen in getting the stock to market.

The SpaceX IPO, by the numbers

Here we look at some of the bigger numbers, the consequential figures, and the eyewatering amounts that make up the company’s S-1 form. 

For instance, SpaceX lost $4.9 billion on revenues of over $18 billion in 2025. That’s only a fraction of the more than $37 billion lost since SpaceX’s inception. 

As CEO, Elon Musk holds about 85.1% of the company’s voting power. You can read more about that in the next section “Who wins and who doesn’t” — and we’ll continue to drop interesting numbers in here.

Here is another figure that caught our attention… 4,400. That’s the number of SpaceX employees who could become millionaires, according to the NYT.

Elon Musk can’t hear you over the sound of his $1.75 trillion IPO: The Equity podcast weighs in on the IPO.

Who wins and who doesn’t

SpaceX is the world’s largest IPO in history and means a big payday for some investors, employees, and of course, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX’s historic IPO: The SpaceX IPO has boosted Musk’s paper wealth to more than $1,000,000,000,000 at a time when he is more hated — and powerful — than ever.

How Elon Musk will increase his power through the SpaceX IPO: Musk, who will have more than 50% of the voting power, will have a monarchical grip over the publicly traded version of SpaceX — control that goes far beyond what other tech founders enjoy.

Who will benefit most from SpaceX IPO? Mostly Elon — and a few from his inner circle: Elon Musk has the largest stake in SpaceX by billions of shares, but others also stand to win. Here’s the rundown of who owns what.

SpaceX SPV investors won’t know their true holdings until post-IPO lock-ups lift: After SpaceX makes its public debut, lower-tier SPV investors face hidden fees, lengthy payout delays, and the risk of outright fraud.

What’s in the S-1

The S-1 registration document gave the world an unprecedented look inside SpaceX, including its financials and its various businesses. The S-1 continued to be amended as the IPO date approached, and we were on it. Here is what we found.

The SpaceX IPO filing is filled with AI bets, Starship dreams, and Elon Musk at the center: The contents of the SpaceX IPO details a business dominated by its Starlink satellite internet offering, more than $37 billion in losses, and future business prospects through its xAI division.

Starship’s path to reusability looks murky after SpaceX’s S-1: SpaceX’s IPO and Starship rocket test flight delivered two big data points that offer a realistic vision for the coming years — and one that may disappoint both the company’s boosters and its critics.

SpaceX warns investors of future dilution, adding fuel to Tesla merger rumors: The company added new language to its S-1, a warning to prospective investors that a major dilution could be in the cards after it goes public.

Pre-IPO deals and events

Leading up to the IPO, SpaceX locked in a string of deals, mostly selling off compute to improve its balance sheet.

Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25B per month for compute: Initial coverage of the Anthropic deal on May 20.

How long is Anthropic’s lease with SpaceX? Opinions vary: Elon Musk keeps downplaying the duration of SpaceX’s contract with Anthropic.

Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute: A Google representative described the deal as a short-term deal addressing unexpected demand for its recently launched AI products.

This article originally published at 10 am ET, June 12, 2026. It has been updated with new coverage of the SpaceX IPO, share price, and other related events.

TL;DR

SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each for a $1.77 trillion valuation. Japanese retail investors bought $2.2 billion of the offering through Mizuho, Rakuten, and SBI.

SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX after raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering ever completed. The previous record holder, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, raised $29.4 billion, making SpaceX’s offering roughly 2.5 times larger.

A regulatory filing on Friday confirmed that Japanese investors accounted for $2.2 billion of the total, purchasing 16.3 million Class A shares, or about 3% of the offering. Japan was one of a handful of countries outside the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe, where retail buyers had direct access to the shares.

How the Japan tranche worked

Mizuho Financial Group’s US investment banking unit is one of 23 underwriters on the deal. It ran the Japanese allocation through its local brokerage and two online platforms, Rakuten Securities and SBI Securities.

SpaceX initially targeted $2 billion from Japanese investors but raised the ceiling to $2.5 billion after demand surged. The final $2.2 billion makes it the largest first-time share sale in Japan since JX Advanced Metals’ IPO last year.

The global picture

Total investor demand reached approximately $250 billion, making the offering nearly four times oversubscribed. BlackRock alone reportedly placed a $5 billion order. Goldman Sachs led the 23-bank underwriting syndicate, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase among the book-running managers.

At the $135 per share price, SpaceX’s fully diluted valuation sits at approximately $1.77 trillion, making it the seventh-largest listed company in the United States, above Tesla’s market capitalisation of roughly $1.6 trillion. If underwriters exercise the full over-allotment option, total proceeds could reach $86.25 billion.

What SpaceX actually is now

SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company. After absorbing Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI in an all-stock transaction in February 2026, it became a conglomerate spanning reusable rockets, satellite internet, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its S-1 filing disclosed $18 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025, alongside a net loss of $4.9 billion. Starlink, the satellite internet division, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating profit, accounting for 61% of total sales and all of the company’s profitability. The xAI segment recorded a $6.35 billion operating loss.

Musk’s grip on voting power

Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity but controls roughly 82% of its votes through a dual-class share structure in which his Class B shares carry disproportionate voting rights. That gives him unilateral authority to elect or remove a majority of the board.

The S-1 prospectus lists 849.5 million Class A shares and 5.57 billion Class B shares, a structure that ensures public shareholders have minimal governance influence regardless of their economic stake.

Who gets rich

The IPO is expected to mint roughly 4,000 millionaires among SpaceX’s workforce, including engineers, cooks, and administrative staff who received equity as part of their compensation. SpaceX set aside up to 5% of shares for employees and their associates.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX spent two decades as a private company, funding its operations through government contracts, private equity rounds, and Starlink revenue. The IPO marks the first time ordinary investors can buy shares directly.

The flags

SpaceX is unprofitable on a GAAP basis, with the xAI segment responsible for the $4.9 billion net loss. Whether Starlink’s profits can scale fast enough to offset xAI’s capital consumption is unresolved.

Musk’s 82% voting control means public shareholders are effectively along for the ride on all strategic decisions, including future acquisitions and capital allocation. The $1.77 trillion valuation implies growth rates no company has ever sustained at this scale, as Fortune has noted, and the xAI integration adds execution risk that did not exist when SpaceX was purely a launch and satellite business.

BlackRock submitted an order to buy at least $5 billion in SpaceX shares ahead of Friday’s debut, the Wall Street Journal reported. That single order is nearly as large as the entire $5.5 billion Cerebras IPO, the biggest of 2026 so far. SpaceX has told banks it will not budge from its $135 per share price.

Total investor demand has reached $250 billion, making the offering nearly four times oversubscribed, according to Reuters. SpaceX plans to sell roughly 555.6 million shares, raising $75 billion at a valuation of approximately $1.77 trillion. Retail investors have requested over $70 billion worth of shares. Up to 30% of the IPO may be allocated to public buyers.

Allocated shares will be available through Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, and E*Trade. Fidelity lowered its minimum account balance for IPO access from $100,000 to $2,000. Schwab still requires $100,000. Robinhood, SoFi, and E*Trade have no stated minimum.

Not everyone is enthusiastic. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a 12-page letter to SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins requesting a delay. She argued the IPO’s size alone “would justify careful SEC review,” and raised concerns about SpaceX’s governance structure. Musk controls 85% of shareholder voting power through supervoting shares, mandatory arbitration, and Texas corporate law. Warren called it “unprecedented power” over investors who would have “significantly fewer rights than those traditionally offered.”

Market analysts have also pushed back on the valuation. Morningstar projected SpaceX should trade at $63 per share, roughly half the asking price. “Big Short” investor Michael Burry said there was “nothing” in the filing to suggest the company is worth $1 trillion, “let alone $2 trillion.” SpaceX valued its total addressable market at $28.5 trillion, a figure analysts called “nonsensical” and “smoke-and-mirrors accounting.”

The financials tell a mixed story. SpaceX disclosed a net loss of $4.28 billion through its latest quarter, after losing $4.94 billion in 2025. Starlink, which generated $4.69 billion in quarterly revenue, is the only profitable segment. The AI arm lost $2.5 billion. Capital expenditure hit $10.1 billion in the quarter, with $7.7 billion going to AI. SpaceX spent $12.7 billion on AI last year, compared to $3.8 billion on space.

If shares trade at $135, Musk’s 42% stake would be worth approximately $688 billion, making him the world’s first trillionaire when combined with his other holdings. SpaceX’s S-1 filing also revealed billionaire-making stakes for president Gwynne Shotwell ($1.6 billion), CFO Bret Johnson ($1.2 billion), and board members including Valor Equity’s Antonio Gracias, whose $4.8 billion net worth could surge by $68 billion.

The IPO arrives after a string of valuation adjustments and last-minute deals. SpaceX signed a $920 million monthly compute deal with Google and a $1.25 billion monthly deal with Anthropic in the weeks before the offering. Warren’s concern is that index funds will be forced to buy SpaceX stock, exposing millions of passive investors to “significant risks with no choice in the matter.”

SpaceX will disclose its final IPO price on Thursday. Trading begins Friday morning on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX.

Quantum Space, a startup with plans to build highly maneuverable spacecraft for the U.S. military, announced plans to go public through a $1.2 billion merger with a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

In a season of mega-IPOs, there’s something almost quaint about a SPAC — in 2021, a fad for going public through the vehicle began in the space sector and spread throughout the tech world. Many SPACs proved disastrous for retail investors who wagered on immature companies, but a few deals, notably Rocket Lab and Planet, proved successful.

Another positive outcome was Intuitive Machines, a purpose-built NASA contractor launched by Kam Ghaffarian, a long-time space investor who backed a team of former NASA officials eager to sell their expertise back to the agency. Today, Intuitive Machines is a $6.4 billion company sending a regular cadence of robotic missions to the moon.

Now, Ghaffarian is trying to do it again with Quantum Space, a startup he launched in 2020 to capitalize on the founding of the U.S. Space Force and the growing need for vehicles that can move between orbits and rendezvous with other spacecraft.

“Defense spending, space infrastructure, and America’s strategic priorities in orbit are converging at exactly the moment Quantum Space is ready to scale,” Ghaffarian told TechCrunch. “The Space Force’s requirements are growing rapidly, and demand for maneuverable spacecraft is accelerating. Ranger is purpose-built to meet both.”

At the helm is CEO Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress and the NASA administrator during President Donald Trump’s first term. A champion of public-private partnerships, Bridenstine will aim to leverage his knowledge of the space industry to win key contracts.

Quantum Space is involved in six government development programs, including one that may see its vehicle head for the moon. But the company has a simple focus.

“We are designed specifically for the national security,” Bridenstine said. While most satellites only carry enough fuel to alter their position slightly and eventually dispose of themselves, a newer generation of spacecraft — including some fielded by Russia and China — are designed to move rapidly between orbits and remain in place for sustained surveillance work.

Ranger, the company’s spacecraft, is designed to match and exceed those competitors. It is expected to carry significant fuel, allowing it to remain in high orbits over long periods to watch rival satellites. The vehicle also has to be refuellable in order to qualify for Andromeda task orders.

Quantum Space was selected to join the Andromeda contract, a $6.2 billion effort that will task companies to develop vehicles for space-based reconnaissance. Now it has to win task orders for actual funded missions starting in 2030.

The SPAC transaction is expected to raise $300 million in private investment alongside any public proceeds, which will be used to build manufacturing facilities in Tulsa, Oklahoma, capable of producing one Ranger per quarter by the end of 2028. The next step is launching the first Ranger prototype to orbit in 2027. The deal is sponsored by Mike Blitzer, the financier who helped bring Intuitive Machines and USA Rare Earth to public markets.

Still, the decision to leave private markets behind highlights the competition Quantum Space faces. True Anomaly, a startup that is also competing for Andromeda task orders, has raised $1 billion from venture investors. The company is also looking to beat out established defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems, among others.

For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday.

SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will trade under the SPCX ticker symbol.

As active trading gets underway tomorrow, SpaceX’s share price may sink or rise. But anecdotal reports suggest that big institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to purchase shares in the 24-year-old technology company.

If the sale is as oversubscribed as the talkative bankers make it out to be, they have an option to bring an additional 83.3 million shares to market, which would raise another $11 billion at the company’s opening price.

Hyperliquid, a crypto betting market that attempts to offer synthetic exposure to SpaceX stock, currently prices the shares at $167, suggesting that market participants expect a classic 20% IPO pop on the first day of trading.

In the longer term, there are big open questions about how SpaceX will be able to justify its eye-popping valuation. The company’s outstanding engineering projects, from the world’s largest reusable rocket to a new American chip fab, fill up a daunting to-do list.

This story is developing …

AI companies have grown into data-hungry entities as their models require ever-larger datasets to train on. To meet that need, many AI startups defy long-standing internet conventions — like respecting robots.txt files, which signal to automated crawlers which parts of a website are off-limits — and scrape data aggressively. This has forced websites to restrict access to their data and, in some cases, strike licensing deals with AI companies. Fitness and social running company Strava is making a move in this direction by restricting its website and introducing fees for developer access.

To stop scraping, the company is increasing security around its website and will now only allow authenticated users to view certain data. Earlier, users were able to see details like public profiles and fitness club listings without logging in. The company is putting all that data behind authentication to protect it from unauthorized AI scraping.

On the API front, developers could previously start building apps on Strava through a free, tiered access program — applying for basic access first, then requesting more as their app grew. Now the company is adding a flat $11.99 per month fee for all developers, though it noted the price may vary by geography.

Strava said its developer community has grown from 185,000 members last year to 241,000 this year, and the company plans to continue supporting them. As part of that, Strava also plans to add support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging standard that lets AI assistants and apps access external data in a structured way, giving Strava more control over exactly what gets shared and how.

The company is also planning to retire some API endpoints — discrete access points that let outside apps pull specific data, like club details — to protect user data. Strava had already tightened API rules in 2024, banning its use for AI training and limiting third-party apps from displaying other users’ data. Those changes drew backlash from developers who said their apps would be severely affected.

While some developers may accept paying a subscription fee, sunsetting certain API endpoints could still impact dependent apps. Strava is giving developers a 90-day grace period before making these changes.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Michael Martin, Strava’s CEO, said unchecked AI scraping could be the death knell of the public internet.

“AI companies are ruthlessly scraping public websites, given their endless need for training data, which is degrading site performance across the board,” Martin said. “We’ve had multiple instances in the last several months where performance has been diminished and, in some cases, impaired. Beyond scraping the public sites, they’re also trying to use our API to get access to our data, ignoring API terms.”

He noted that Strava has refused overtures from leading AI labs seeking data licensing deals. He specifically singled out Perplexity, saying the AI search startup routed its scraping through aggregator services to obscure its origin despite being turned away. This is consistent with Perplexity having been accused of similar behavior elsewhere in the past.

Martin also flagged server overload caused by poorly built vibe-coded apps, whose API calls are often inefficiently structured and generate a disproportionate load on Strava’s systems. It’s a pattern: When Meta banned third-party chatbots from WhatsApp last year, it made a similar argument about system overhead.

The timing probably isn’t coincidental. Strava confidentially filed for an IPO earlier this year, and its move to protect its data may be intended to signal data discipline to prospective investors. The comparison to Reddit’s 2024 crackdown on API access is one Martin was quick to address. Unlike Reddit, which priced API access by the number of calls (making it unaffordable for many app developers), Strava is betting a flat fee keeps the developer ecosystem intact.

“We want the users to feel that they own their data and feel comfortable with how we are controlling and securing it. But we want the developers to continue to flourish and grow,” Martin said.

TL;DR

Salesforce’s stake in Anthropic is now worth approximately $5 billion after investing since early 2023, representing roughly two-thirds of its entire strategic portfolio. The return comes as Anthropic files confidentially for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation.

Salesforce has a stake in Anthropic worth approximately $5 billion after investing repeatedly in the Claude developer since early 2023, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The software company first participated in Anthropic’s fundraising with roughly $50 million and has continued investing in every subsequent round. With Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing also landing on Monday, Salesforce is positioned to realise one of the largest venture-style returns in enterprise software history.

The scale of the return becomes clearer in portfolio context. Salesforce’s total strategic investments across hundreds of companies were valued at $7.8 billion at the end of April, according to SEC filings. That figure predates Anthropic’s latest $65 billion funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion and more than doubled its previous valuation. After the revaluation, the Anthropic stake alone represents roughly two-thirds of Salesforce’s entire strategic investment portfolio.

The early bet

Salesforce Ventures acknowledged in a February blog post that the initial investment was not a consensus trade. “In 2023, betting on a research-heavy startup at a meaningful valuation was not obvious, given there was no market precedent of AI research turning into commercial success,” the firm wrote. Anthropic’s models now power AI features across Salesforce’s product suite, including Slack, and CEO Marc Benioff has said Salesforce will spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.

The investment structure gives Salesforce a double exposure. It is both an investor capturing Anthropic’s valuation gains and a customer embedding Anthropic’s models into its own products, including the Agentforce AI agent platform that reached $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue last quarter. As enterprise AI spending shifts toward agentic platforms, Salesforce benefits regardless of whether its own AI products or Anthropic’s underlying models capture more of the value.

Not the only windfall

Salesforce is not the only company reaping outsized returns from early Anthropic bets. Zoom invested approximately $51 million in Anthropic’s Series C in May 2023 through its Zoom Ventures arm. That stake is now worth approximately $1.3 billion, a roughly 25x return in three years. Accel, which invested in Anthropic’s Series G, has seen its stake more than quadruple in months as the company’s valuation surged past OpenAI’s.

The returns reflect a dynamic that has become defining in the current AI cycle: a small number of model providers, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI, are capturing an extraordinary share of both venture capital and unrealised gains. For Salesforce, the $5 billion Anthropic stake has appreciated more than the combined market capitalisation gains of many of its software acquisitions.

The risks ahead

The $5 billion valuation is on paper until Anthropic’s IPO provides a public market price. Anthropic’s ongoing legal dispute with the Pentagon, which designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to grant the military unrestricted model access, represents a material overhang. Anthropic has said the designation could jeopardise billions in revenue.

For Salesforce specifically, the concentration of its strategic portfolio in a single company creates exposure that investors will scrutinise. If Anthropic’s IPO prices below the $965 billion private valuation, or if the stock declines post-listing, the mark-to-market impact on Salesforce’s balance sheet would be significant. Salesforce itself announced the acquisition of Contentful on the same day, continuing a heavy spending pace that has kept its own stock under pressure for months.

But the strategic logic of the original bet has been validated. Salesforce invested in Anthropic before the market had consensus that AI research labs could become commercial businesses. Three years later, Anthropic is filing for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, and the $50 million that started the relationship has grown roughly 100-fold.

TL;DR

Space stocks are selling off sharply as the SpaceX IPO approaches and a Blue Origin rocket explosion rattles investor confidence. The Procure Space ETF dropped 11% in two sessions, with Rocket Lab, Intuitive Machines, and AST SpaceMobile falling 17-23%.

A rally that carried space-related stocks to extraordinary gains this year is showing serious cracks. The Procure Space ETF, which trades under the ticker UFO, has dropped almost 11% in just two sessions. Intuitive Machines and Rocket Lab have each fallen roughly 17%. AST SpaceMobile, which had become a retail-trading favourite, has sunk nearly 23%. The selloff extends losses that began late last week and accelerated on Monday.

Two catalysts converged. On Thursday, Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket exploded during a routine hot-fire test at Cape Canaveral, a spectacular failure that damaged the launchpad and reminded investors that the space business remains physically dangerous and technically unpredictable. On Friday, SpaceX cut its IPO valuation target to $1.8 trillion from at least $2 trillion, signalling that even the sector’s dominant player is acknowledging that market expectations may have run ahead of reality.

The proxy trade unwinds

The space stock rally of the past several months was driven substantially by the anticipation of SpaceX’s record-setting IPO. With SpaceX private, investors who wanted exposure to the space economy bought publicly listed proxies: Rocket Lab for launch, Intuitive Machines for lunar services, AST SpaceMobile for satellite communications, Redwire for space infrastructure. As SpaceX’s IPO filing moved from rumour to reality, these proxy stocks surged on the assumption that a rising tide would lift all rockets.

The Procure Space ETF is still up almost 60% year to date despite the two-day rout. Rocket Lab entered the selloff up 413% over the past year. But Bloomberg Intelligence analyst George Ferguson identified the structural problem: once SpaceX is actually available to buy, investors may dump the proxies in favour of the real thing.

“The market may be worried investors that want exposure to space will drop the currently listed names for SpaceX, as it has a much larger and better record of space launches,” Ferguson said. “At similar valuations, SpaceX would likely be the better company to own.”

Valuations detached from financials

Jefferies analyst Greg Konrad underscored the disconnect on Monday by downgrading Redwire from buy to hold, writing that the stock’s recent gains “do not correlate with financials” and instead reflect “multiple expansion on the excitement of the SpaceX IPO that has shed a positive spotlight on the space sector.” Redwire had nearly tripled in the previous month to a record high before dropping 16% on Monday. SpaceX’s own S-1 filing revealed the financial scale that makes comparisons with smaller space companies difficult to sustain.

AST SpaceMobile trades at roughly 260 times estimated 2026 sales. Rocket Lab, despite its operational progress with the Electron and Neutron rockets, carries a valuation built on optimism about future government and commercial contracts rather than current revenue. The space sector has followed a pattern familiar from the AI boom: a narrative-driven rally that prices in years of growth before the revenue materialises.

The Blue Origin factor

The New Glenn explosion added a visceral dimension to the correction. The rocket erupted during a hot-fire test of its seven BE-4 first-stage engines, sending debris across the Cape Canaveral launchpad and causing heavy damage to the infrastructure. While SpaceX has experienced its own launch failures, the Blue Origin incident reminded public market investors, many of them new to the space sector, that rockets are not software. Hardware failures destroy expensive assets instantly and set development timelines back by months or years.

“That implies valuations are a bit rich,” Ferguson said. The Blue Origin explosion was “a reminder that this is a difficult business.”

Virgin Galactic’s divergence

Not every space stock fell. Virgin Galactic soared as much as 44% on Monday before paring gains to as little as 1.1%, a move that illustrated the speculative, momentum-driven character of the sector rather than any fundamental shift in the company’s business. SpaceX’s lowered valuation target may have triggered short-covering in some names while accelerating selling in others.

The question for the space sector is whether the SpaceX IPO, expected to price in early June with marketing beginning on 4 June, draws capital into the sector or pulls it out of everything that is not SpaceX. If institutional investors consolidate their space exposure into the one company with a proven business model, consistent launch cadence, and Starlink revenue, the proxy stocks that rode the wave up could face sustained pressure even as the overall sector grows.

SpaceX has added new language to its IPO filing that warns prospective investors about the company’s access to a potentially scarce resource: water.

The company, which now includes Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, wrote in an amended version of the filing on Monday that access to water — required to cool its data centers — is just as important as SpaceX’s ability to secure power, processors, and other critical resources.

The addition comes amid an ever-evolving debate about how much water data centers use, and whether that usage is contributing to localized droughts that are being made worse by climate change.

Deep in the “risk factors” section of SpaceX’s IPO filing, the company added language about water to a section about the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure.

Previously, SpaceX focused on telling investors that its data centers were primarily constrained by access to “power at economically feasible prices,” along with long construction timelines and material shortages. The amended filing adds multiple lines about water access. SpaceX now tells prospective investors in the IPO that data center buildouts are constrained by the “availability of power and water at economically feasible prices.”

The company goes on to say that “significant water resources may be required for cooling large-scale data center operations.” Water availability is such a concern that SpaceX says it has become a “critical consideration in data center site selection, development and operations.”

SpaceX also says that “water scarcity, drought conditions, competition for local water resources, or regulatory restrictions on water use could limit our ability to obtain sufficient water for cooling, constrain data center cooling capacity, increase our costs, delay or limit expansion of our data center infrastructure, or require us to implement alternative cooling techniques that may be more costly or less available.”

It’s not clear what inspired SpaceX to add this language about water to its filing, or why it was left out of the initial version. The company is in the pre-IPO period, during which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been sending SpaceX “comment letters” seeking clarification or additional details about the filing. It’s possible that questions from the SEC led to this particular change, though we won’t know until those comment letters are made public in the weeks following the IPO.

Adding more detail about SpaceX’s access to water was not the only change the company made in this first amended filing. SpaceX also revealed that it is setting aside up to 5% of the stock being sold in the IPO for employees and friends of executives. SpaceX also added language that warns investors that the company may issue a “significant” number of shares in future transactions following the IPO — a hint at a potential merger with Tesla — which could create dilution for existing shareholders.