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Predicting the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs — With Dick Costolo
TL;DR
SpaceX may get the easiest IPO ride — Dick Costolo says Elon Musk’s retail-investor narrative machine could push SpaceX above $2 trillion on day one because limited float plus huge demand can overpower near-term valuation math.
OpenAI has the hardest story to defend — Unlike Musk’s future-facing promises, Sam Altman has attached real dollar commitments to compute and data centers, leaving CFO Sarah Friar and the team to explain how more than $1 trillion in obligations maps to revenue and eventual profitability.
Anthropic could be the market’s ‘cleanest’ AI IPO — Costolo sees Dario Amodei’s enterprise-first focus, Claude Code’s strong reputation, and a steadier narrative as making Anthropic the most straightforward long-term bet of the three.
Going public changes the internal psychology overnight — Costolo’s advice to first-time IPO CEOs is to explicitly prepare employees for irrational 15–20% stock swings on days when ‘nothing particularly happened,’ because that whiplash can destabilize a company fast.
The real risk may be politics, not just pricing — Costolo thinks the biggest threat to AI giants is a bipartisan backlash against data centers, citing local opposition, the Utah project controversy, and polling showing 7 in 10 Americans don’t want these facilities nearby.
Silicon Valley’s AI boom is creating a visible class divide — He reacts to the idea that roughly 10,000 people at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Nvidia, and Meta may have hit $20M-plus wealth while many other engineers now fear their skills are commoditized and their upside is gone.
The Breakdown
SpaceX could hit a $2 trillion day-one valuation on tiny float and pure Elon belief, while OpenAI may face a much harder public-market reality because its trillion-dollar compute commitments are easier to scrutinize than a vision story. Dick Costolo argues the next AI IPO wave will be less about raw numbers than who controls the narrative, prepares employees for stock-price whiplash, and convinces the public that massive AI buildouts are worth it.
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