OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are each racing toward Wall Street this year, but a financial adviser warns that lumping all three as one artificial intelligence trade is a costly mistake.

SpaceX will price its shares on Thursday at $135 each, raising $75 billion in what would be the largest initial public offering in history. Demand has run about twice the shares on offer, with orders reaching roughly $150 billion, according to Reuters. Elon Musk’s company will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a valuation of approximately $1.8 trillion, following a pricing expected Wednesday.

OpenAI and Anthropic are following weeks behind. Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration statement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, after raising $65 billion in private funding that lifted its valuation to approximately $965 billion. OpenAI, the ChatGPT creator, filed confidentially around the same time and is targeting a September debut at a private market valuation between $730 billion and $850 billion.
Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organisations, says grouping all three as a single artificial intelligence (AI) boom trade ignores structural differences that matter to returns.

“Public markets are going to ask tougher questions than private investors have asked,” Green said.

OpenAI carries the strongest consumer brand in the sector, with more than 900 million weekly active users and about 50 million paying subscribers. Revenue has grown fast, but the company has told investors it does not expect positive cash flow until 2030, and its spending commitments dwarf current revenue. Being the most recognised name in AI and being its best-listed stock are not the same thing.

Anthropic has concentrated on enterprise customers rather than consumer volume. The Claude developer’s business clients tend to sign larger contracts, are less sensitive to price, and stay once a platform embeds in their operations. The company’s annual revenue run rate hit roughly $47 billion in May 2026, up from approximately $10 billion the prior year, a trajectory Green says deserves attention from investors looking beyond brand recognition.

SpaceX is more than a rocket company. Through Starlink, it operates satellite communications infrastructure with commercial and government clients. New revenue disclosures show a cloud services deal with Alphabet’s Google worth $920 million a month through 2029, alongside an earlier contract with Anthropic. Green describes the investment case as a bet on Musk’s record of achieving what critics said was impossible, a record many investors find hard to dismiss regardless of the asking price.

The second half of 2026 will be the first public market test of frontier AI company economics, a sector that has until now set its own prices far from audited disclosure requirements. Whether the combined weight of the listings becomes the most consequential initial public offering cycle since the dot-com era or the most expensive lesson in narrative versus fundamentals remains the open question.