Greetings! Anita here. It’s been a relatively slow week for SpaceX news, but that will soon change. Musk’s rocketship company is expected to launch its investor roadshow next week ahead of a mid-June IPO. The milestone will likely usher in a flood of giddy headlines and a lot of debate on Reddit forums and cable TV on whether individual investors should buy in. The answer: It’ll make sense for day traders and younger investors. But Boomers could get burned. One reason is the high volume of shares available for individuals to buy in the offering, which Reuters reported could be as high as 30%, or triple the portion typically reserved in public debuts. Those shares available to investors on Robinhood and other stock apps could pave the path for some pretty wild share price volatility following SpaceX’s debut.
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Greetings! Anita here.
It’s been a relatively slow week for SpaceX news, but that will soon change. Musk’s rocketship company is expected to launch its investor roadshow next week ahead of a mid-June IPO. The milestone will likely usher in a flood of giddy headlines and a lot of debate on Reddit forums and cable TV on whether individual investors should buy in. The answer: It’ll make sense for day traders and younger investors. But Boomers could get burned.
One reason is the high volume of shares available for individuals to buy in the offering, which Reuters reported could be as high as 30%, or triple the portion typically reserved in public debuts. Those shares available to investors on Robinhood and other stock apps could pave the path for some pretty wild share price volatility following SpaceX’s debut.
While anyone can trade around volatility, investing in SpaceX at a near-$2 trillion valuation—the high end of chatter about its expected IPO price—wouldn’t be great for, say, a retirement-aged investor. There are a few different paths SpaceX could take to eventually grow into, or even past, such a high valuation. The problem is that none of them are likely to materialize soon.
For instance, a $2 trillion valuation would amount to 107 times last year’s revenue of nearly $19 billion. Palantir, the most expensive software stock, trades at around 40 times next year’s revenue. Let’s say that SpaceX, given investors’ conviction in Musk, can similarly fetch a multiple of 40 times forward revenue. Using that multiple, it would need to generate around $50 billion in sales to justify a $2 trillion valuation – something Pitchbook analyst Franco Granda predicted in a recent report would only happen after 2030 (though he didn’t include xAI, which contributed $3.2 billion to SpaceX’s top line last year).
That SpaceX can command such a high multiple is plausible, Granda wrote, “but investors should understand that they are paying for 2030 economics at 2026 prices.” Not to mention there’s always the possibility that analyst forecasts are overly optimistic.
In its launch business, which generated just over $4 billion in revenue last year, SpaceX has yet to demonstrate it can make a viable, fully-reusable rocket. Its Starlink satellite internet business, whose revenue grew by almost 50% in 2025 and made up the biggest share of the $18.7 billion total, could edge out legacy telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon. But that will take time. SpaceX says the total potential market for its xAI artificial intelligence unit is $26.5 trillion, but for now xAI is bleeding money and revamping its business model.
That’s fine for Gen Z investors who don’t need to worry about income (like retirees do) and aren’t afraid to take risks, unlike the Millennials and Gen Xers who are fretting about housing down payments or college tuition.
One twenty-something investor told me he plans to buy SpaceX shares when they are publicly available because the opportunity is akin to one of the hallmarks of global capitalism: the VOC. More commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, that company dominated the Dutch stock market through the 18th century because it had tentacles in many different corners of global trade, including spices, textiles and coffee.
“These things have happened before and they can happen again. I don’t want to rule that out for a lack of imagination,” he said.
Indeed, SpaceX bulls are betting the company’s diversification will allow Musk to realize the near impossible. It can, in theory, use the massive data centers it is building for a variety of different needs, from renting them out to other compute-constrained AI firms (as it’s doing with its recent deal with Anthropic for $1.25 billion per month) to using them to serve its own models if its Grok chatbot surged in popularity.
SpaceX could also use its new public stock to buy Musk’s Tesla carmaker in addition to finalizing its planned $60 billion acquisition of coding assistant Cursor. Both would expand SpaceX’s revenue and potential market.
Imagination, even more than patience, is always the hallmark of the Musk investor.
Anthropic’s New, Deep-Pocketed Backers
Anthropic just became the world’s most valuable startup with its latest funding round that priced the firm at $900 billion before the new money. That’s partly thanks to investments from memory-chip makers—Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix—whose stocks have all rocketed by several hundred percent over the last year amid surging demand for their products from AI firms. In backing Anthropic, they are taking a page from Amazon and Alphabet’s books; both firms have invested in the model builder before in exchange for commitments that Anthropic would spend money on their cloud services.
Given the backdrop of how AI deals have evolved, it was only a matter of time before the three firms, which together make up almost 90% of the global market for memory chips that help pipe data to GPUs and CPUs for faster data processing, started using their cash to prop up large customers.
All three memory chip makers are newly flush with steady streams of cash flow from AI customers. Micron ended the February quarter with $13.9 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet, 84% more than it had at the same point a year ago.”
Samsung and SK Hynix, meanwhile, both have positive cash balances that have grown in the last few quarters. SK Hynix had $23 billion in excess cash, after subtracting outstanding debt, in the March quarter, compared to the same time last year, when it had more debt than cash.
It’s possible the relationship between Anthropic and the three chipmakers goes deeper than capital alone, and that they are partnering to build technology that reduces Anthropic’s dependence on Nvidia for chips outside of the GPUs for which Nvidia is best known.
I wrote in December that OpenAI’s deals to secure memory chips from Samsung and SK Hynix would give the model maker more control over its access to those scarce chips, even though it can theoretically get them from Nvidia alongside GPUs. In forging its own direct relationship with these manufacturers, Anthropic is taking a similar tack. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic is getting capital to grow its business in return.
As the memory makers continue to generate more and more cash, it wouldn’t be surprising if their circular relationships with model builders get even deeper.
In Other News
• Anthropic also announced its new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4.8, which showed improvements in standardized AI performance evaluations in coding, financial analysis and other fields.
• Dell’s shares rocketed nearly 40% in after-hours trading after the company reported that revenue grew 88% in its latest quarter as demand for AI poured jet fuel on its server, storage and networking businesses.
• The Illinois legislature passed a bill that would require major AI companies to submit their model safety plans for third-party audits, as well as create whistleblower protections for those companies’ employees.
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