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The United States is facing what’s shaping up to be the largest series of initial public offerings in the history of the modern stock market. How they go is anyone’s guess, but the results are sure to be extreme one way or another.
There are three absolute whoppers looming on the horizon: Elon Musk’s absurd $1.75 trillion SpaceX public launch targeted for early June, as well as IPOs by the already-hulking AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI. As the Economist notes, the triple threat could feed some $4 trillion worth of value into the US stock market — if, that is, the market can keep them down, or even swallow them all in the first place.
As the publication observes, huge IPOs like his are typically seen as signs that a bull market, a long period of rising stock prices, is about to come to an end. For example, we saw similar conditions prior to market downturns in 2021, 2008, and the late 1990s. The Economist explains that mega-IPOs sometimes signal bear markets — prolonged periods of declining prices — as in 2021, but could likewise forewarn heavier downturns, like the Great Recession or the collapse of the dot-com bubble.
How severe that reversal could be depends in no small part on how those three mega corps perform. If there’s underwhelming investor appetite for their unprecedented valuation targets, the Economist notes the three IPOs could easily drag markets into correction territory all on their own.
That’s because each firm is heavily involved in the financial behemoth that is AI. With global private investment in the tech skyrocketing despite no tangible financial returns, the bill will eventually come due on the AI frenzy. If the IPOs disappoint, analysts fret, it could signal that patience has finally run out for the country’s unprecedented technological spending.
What ultimately sparks the panic that sends stock brokers stampeding for the door is impossible to predict, but it seems painfully clear this can’t keep on forever.
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