When stock markets get loud, they tend to get reckless. The Financial Times's Lex column points to two recent moments when the enthusiasm boiled over — the first quarter of 2000, and the opening months of 2021 — and notes that in both cases, the rush of companies racing to list shares ended in painful corrections. Now, with SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all preparing initial public offerings, or IPOs, Lex argues the pattern may be about to repeat.
The scale is hard to overstate. According to the column, if each of the three firms sells just 5% of its rumoured valuation in shares, the combined raise would exceed $180 billion. For perspective, every US IPO in the entire year 2000 — the peak of the dot-com bubble — raised about $106 billion, or roughly $200 billion in today's money. Three deals, in other words, could rival an entire bubble year. SpaceX alone is reportedly seeking around $75 billion, which would make it the largest US tech IPO on record by money raised, ahead of Facebook, Alibaba and Uber.
Here's the catch: all three companies are chasing the same prize. Lex identifies it as the $22.7 trillion global market for 'enterprise applications' — the software businesses use to run themselves. SpaceX founder Elon Musk is pitching a new product called Macrohard that he claims will 'fundamentally transform how companies are structured and operate.' Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is already heading there with automation and coding tools. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, wants its share too. An investor could, of course, buy all three — but doing so may force them to sell other holdings to make room, dragging the rest of the tech sector down with the new entrants.
So how should investors choose? Lex offers three lenses. The first is computing power, which is becoming a scarce asset. OpenAI has locked in around 10 gigawatts of compute, dwarfing SpaceX's roughly 1 GW. Anthropic, less blessed with chips and servers, is renting from Musk at a reported $15 billion a year. The second lens is profitability and product fit: by that measure, Lex suggests Anthropic looks like the better bet. The third is Plan B. If AI proves less lucrative than the hype suggests, SpaceX still has Starlink, its satellite-communications business — a fallback Anthropic and OpenAI lack.
None of the three has clearly won the race for product supremacy. And because each of the founders carries a distinctive blend of eccentricity, stubbornness and charisma, Lex predicts that some investors will simply 'go with vibes' rather than spreadsheets. That, the column suggests, is precisely how previous bubbles have looked from the inside. The deals may be record-breaking and the technology genuinely transformative — but the dynamic of too many giant listings squeezed into too short a window is a familiar one, and history's verdict on such moments has rarely been kind.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are sprinting toward the public markets at the same time — chasing the same prize, the same investors, and possibly the same kind of crash that followed the last two IPO frenzies.
Three of the most valuable private companies on Earth — Elon Musk's SpaceX, OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (the maker of Claude) — are all preparing to go public roughly at once. The Financial Times's Lex column warns this echoes the IPO booms of early 2000 and early 2021, both of which ended badly for investors who bought near the top.
Lex notes that if each of the three companies sells just 5% of its rumoured valuation in shares, that alone would dump more than $180 billion of new equity onto the market. For comparison, the entire haul of IPOs in the year 2000 was about $106 billion — roughly $200 billion in today's money. In other words: three deals could rival an entire bubble year.
The trick is that all three companies are aiming at the same target — the $22.7 trillion global market for 'enterprise applications,' meaning the software businesses use to run themselves. Think of it less like three startups and more like three heavyweight boxers stepping into the same ring at the same time.
If you've been hearing 'AI is going to change everything' for two years, this is the moment the claim meets a price tag. Whatever the market decides these three companies are worth will shape the next decade of tech jobs, college majors, venture funding and even the index funds inside your parents' retirement accounts. A boom would pour money into AI hiring and research; a bust would freeze startups, layoffs would follow, and the 'AI engineer' job market high-schoolers are eyeing today could look very different by graduation.
Lex's most uncomfortable observation is the historical pattern: 2000 and 2021 both featured stampedes of listings, and both ended in painful corrections. The wildcard this time is that the three founders — Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei — each bring a distinct personality and pitch, and Lex suggests some investors will simply pick on 'vibes.' Watch for which one prints first, how much they actually raise versus the $180bn-plus floor, and whether other tech stocks start sliding to fund the shopping spree. That last effect — the quiet sell-off in everything else — is usually where bubbles really start to crack.