Summary

• SpaceX IPO filing reveals $4.28 billion quarterly loss

• Analysts, fund managers broadly bullish, citing Musk's track record and Starlink's revenue

• Starship delays or cost overruns could threaten AI, satellite expansion and overall growth

May 21 (Reuters) - Investors buying into SpaceX's nearly $2 trillion IPO are making a high-stakes wager that CEO Elon Musk can turn a fast-growing satellite business into something far bigger, using an unproven rocket ​to unlock an ambitious push into AI.

Musk has grown SpaceX into the world's largest rocket business by launching thousands of Starlink internet satellites and pioneering reusable rockets ‌that have transformed the economics of space…Read Full Article

Rainmaker Securities Managing Director Greg Martin joins Josh Lipton on Market Domination to discuss Cerebras Systems (CESY.PVT) IPO, which could be valued at $48.8 billion.

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AI chipmaker Cerebras stock slid in early trading Friday, after soaring 68% in its public debut Thursday sending a strong signal as the first of many AI company initial public offerings this year.

Meanwhile Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s (AAPL) Tim Cook, and Tesla’s (TSLA) Elon Musk are in China alongside President Trump for his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Xi told the CEOs and others that China will “open wider” to US businesses…Watch Full Video

The US venture secondary market just reached an annualized value of $112.2 billion and surpassed public listings. It is a milestone worth celebrating, but one that won’t last long.

The same three companies that drove much of the secondary market’s explosive growth are now preparing to go public. What happens to a $112 billion market when its most valuable constituents leave?

In this note, we size the concentration risk posed by SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic’s mega-IPOs to venture secondaries, especially as the top 20 names account for 81.1% of secondary trading value, according to Hiive. When these companies go public, their returns will be held in lockup, then directed toward addressing venture’s four-year distribution deficit before any capital meaningfully recycles back into secondaries. The vacancy will be real, and the recovery will take time…Read Full Article

Desperate buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of secondary shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company's valuation on some sites to $1 trillion, a price that would have seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, traders Business Insider spoke with are seeing slumping demand for OpenAI, which is now trading at a discount to Anthropic, despite OpenAI being valued at $852 billion, more than twice Anthropic's valuation in their most recent funding rounds.

Anthropic's valuation now hovers at around $1 trillion on Forge Global, a leading private marketplace exchange, its CEO Kelly Rodriques told Business Insider. OpenAI's valuation on the platform is $880 billion, a slight uptick from its March funding round…Read Full Article

Greg Martin, managing director of private markets at Rainmaker Securities, discusses the signs of life the IPO market is showing and what impact the expectations of large listings from Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are having on investors. Martin speaks with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech.”

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SpaceX’s initial public offering may be the largest IPO ever, but it might just be a prelude to the largest merger ever—a combination of Tesla with Elon Musk’s space venture.

On April 1, SpaceX reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO. It’s likely to raise $75 billion, more than double the $29 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, and three times the $25 billion Alibaba Group Holding raised in 2014. Its valuation could come in close to $2 trillion, immediately making the company the sixth-most valuable in the U.S. Not bad for a venture that was worth only $350 billion a year ago and was founded by a 30-year-old who thought it was dumb to dispose of rockets as if they were plastic straws…Read Full Article

• SpaceX would be sixth-largest US-listed firm at IPO valuation

• Starlink underpins majority of SpaceX's revenue

• Debate centers on which publicly traded firms are truly comparable, if any

April 8 (Reuters) - Elon Musk’s SpaceX is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation in its forthcoming initial public offering. How far into the stratosphere is that?

Going by common Wall Street metrics, the answer is, way out there. SpaceX would immediately become the sixth most-valuable publicly listed U.S. firm, worth more ​than the likes of Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab, which has been publicly listed for more than a decade, and Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), opens new tab, a company older than SpaceX founder Elon Musk…Read Full Article

Every quarter, Setter Capital, a secondary advisory firm that has completed more than $30 billion in private market transactions since 2006, surveys hundreds of investors to rank the 30 most sought-after startup shares on the secondary market. The resulting “Setter 30” list is a map of private market conviction: which companies investors want so badly they will pay a premium to buy someone else’s stake, rather than wait for a primary round or a public listing. The Q1 2026 edition carries a set of signals that anyone tracking venture capital or the broader technology market may be noticing already.

Taken together, the data points to a secondary market that has grown structurally more important, is concentrating around a smaller number of very large bets, and is beginning to behave less like a niche liquidity mechanism and more like a parallel exchange…Read Full Article

SpaceX's (SPAX.PVT) IPO filing last week set the stage for what could be the largest IPO in history at a target valuation north of $2 trillion. It could also provide a big boost beyond Elon Musk's own rocket company.

Shares of Rocket Lab (RKLB) surged roughly 10%; Planet Labs (PL) jumped more than 10%, and AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) climbed even more on the news. The market's reaction provided something of  a confirmation that a SpaceX public listing won't just benefit SpaceX shareholders…Read Full Article and Watch Video

Glen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.

As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, whose focus includes private securities markets — it facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks — Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-biting moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX…Read Full Article

• Buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% to buy Anduril shares.

• The steep markup reflects a two-tiered class for accessing stock in the hottest startups.

• Data from Caplight highlights a supply imbalance, with buyer demand surging to 97% while sellers' demand is at 3%.

Anduril hasn't even finalized its next funding round, and investors are already eager to pay up like it's a sold-out concert. As marquee venture firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz line up to back the defense tech startup at a reported $60 billion valuation, others shut out of the deal are scrambling to buy shares on secondary markets at steep premiums…Read Ful Article

Key Points

• Elon Musk’s net worth soared past $800 billion this week after he merged SpaceX with xAI in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.

• For Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire, SpaceX would have to reach $1.6 trillion in value, assuming Tesla’s stock price stays flat.

• With Tesla’s brand value and core auto sales in decline, and its long-promised robotaxis and humanoid robots still in development, the company’s stock price is down about 9% this year.

Elon Musk’s journey to becoming the world’s first trillionaire will likely be powered by rockets rather than cars, as SpaceX now accounts for nearly two-thirds of the Tesla CEO’s wealth…Read Full Article

Young AI startups looking to tap the public markets still won’t have an easy path, as they will need to prepare for more detailed financial disclosures at a time when both companies are burning cash, Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker Securities, told MarketWatch.

“They’ll have to manage their negative cash flow,” Martin said. OpenAI in particular “needs to clarify their specific position in the market, and have a better plan to get to a profitable position sooner.”…Read Full Article

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SpaceX is reportedly lining up four major Wall Street banks for a 2026 IPO that could provide the reset the market needs. 

The company just completed a tender offer at an $800 billion valuation, and secondary market demand is through the roof. If SpaceX goes public anywhere near its rumored $1.5 trillion valuation, it could trigger an IPO cascade for other late-stage unicorns like OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks. 

Watch as Equity host Rebecca Bellan chats with Greg Martin, Managing Director at Rainmaker Securities, about why this IPO feels different, how tech employees are cashing out through secondary markets before companies go public, and what investors are actually looking for in pre-IPO shares. 

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In 1999, stock buyers had a cornucopia of new options as U.S. companies went public at a near-record clip. The crop included names like Nvidia and BlackRock that, for those who purchased them on the first day of trading, have delivered spectacular long-term returns…Read Full Article

• Five months after Scale AI’s high-profile founder joined Meta in a blockbuster deal, the startup’s CFO is trying to show that the company remains on a growth trajectory.

• “People mischaracterize this deal as some sort of acquihire or some sort of licensing deal, which is not true,” said Dennis Cinelli in his first public interview after joining Scale as CFO in 2022.

• Cinelli said Scale’s data business has grown every month since the Meta deal.

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The startup world celebrates stories of founders who scratch and claw for years and, finally, become multi-millionaires when the business they built goes public or is acquired. These tales of wealth are common in crypto too—though the path to a big payday is often much shorter.

Case in point: Bam Azizi founded crypto payments firm Mesh in 2020, and this August raised $130 million in a so-called Series B funding round. In the ordinary course of things, capital raised in a Series A or Series B round goes almost entirely to fund a startup’s growth. But in this case, the round included at least $20 million for Azizi himself…Read Full Article

• Founders have raised more than $24 billion since the November election for special purpose acquisition companies, with a sizable number of them having ties to Trump's inner circle.

• The bulk of the action is in businesses that pair well with "America First" rhetoric, including nuclear and quantum computing, and cryptocurrencies.

• SPAC skeptics caution that the investments can be exceedingly risky, with only about 11% of companies that have gone public through a SPAC merger since 2019 trading above their issue price.

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• A surge of interest in private companies, particularly those related to artificial intelligence, is driving more inquiries and trades on platforms offering accredited investors the chance to invest in pre-IPO names.

• Trading volume on the private secondary market run by EquityZen Securities more than doubled in the third quarter versus a year ago, and the total value of buy orders on Rainmaker Securities’ platform rose more than three times from the first quarter.

• Investor appetite is soaring for AI-related names, including both AI-native startups and established software as a service firms embedding AI into their offerings, with AI-related firms accounting for about a third of private stock trading.

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