The world's most anticipated IPO just blinked

Editor’s note: The biggest IPO in history debuted on June 12 and was celebrated as a generational milestone. Fourteen days later, it's teaching every AI company still waiting to go public a very uncomfortable lesson about what public markets actually do to frontier-technology valuations. OpenAI was supposed to follow SpaceX into the market later this year. Not anymore. 

The question isn't whether OpenAI delays. The question is what that means for every company that was planning to price off its success.

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But before we get to that, let's take a quick detour on how the markets are looking and what matters…

3 Movers in 3 Minutes

#1 OpenAI delays IPO. The New York Times reported Thursday night that OpenAI is leaning toward pushing its IPO to 2027, citing internal deliberations involving at least three people close to the talks. CEO Sam Altman has rejected any valuation below $1 trillion as a "non-starter," while CFO Sarah Friar is urging the company to wait, citing ongoing cash burn and the burden of public reporting standards.

#2 Money is flowing hard into healthcare. Eli Lilly (LLY), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and AbbVie (ABBV) are among the session's standout gainers. By Thursday's close, 63% of S&P 500 stocks were trading above their 50-day moving averages, up from 50% at the start of June. The market is broadening even as the Nasdaq bleeds.

#3 University of Michigan Sentiment. The final June consumer sentiment reading came in at 49.5, just above the 49.0 consensus and 10.5% above May's reading, marking a meaningful recovery from the lows hit during the Iran conflict. The improvement was concentrated in longer-term expectations, which surged 16% as consumers' concerns about the conflict's economic fallout eased. Still, the index sits 13% below February's pre-conflict level, and nearly 20% below a year ago. The consumer is stabilizing, but not recovered.

And with that out of the way, let's get to today's big story: the IPO that put an entire pipeline on pause.

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This new "super startup" has nothing to do with cars or robots or space or AI…

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On June 12, SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share, raised more than $85 billion, and became the largest public offering in history. The stock opened at $150, rocketed to $225 within five days, and briefly pushed the company's market cap above $2 trillion. Elon Musk, briefly, became the world's first verified trillionaire.

Fourteen days later, SpaceX trades near $153. That's a 32% retracement from peak to present. And every AI company that had been watching the SpaceX debut as a proof of concept for their own public ambitions is now reading a different lesson from the data.

The most visible consequence arrived Thursday evening, when the New York Times reported that OpenAI is leaning toward delaying its IPO until 2027. The company had confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC on June 8, hired bankers and lawyers eyeing a late-2026 debut, and entered the quarter as the most anticipated public offering since Saudi Aramco. Now its advisers have presented executives with a stark binary: wait until next year and pursue the $1 trillion valuation, or accept a lower number and list sooner.

CEO Sam Altman's answer, per people close to the talks, was unambiguous. Any reduction from the trillion-dollar target is a "non-starter."

To understand why SpaceX's post-IPO retracement matters so much for OpenAI, you have to understand what IPO pricing actually does in a market cycle.

When a landmark company goes public, it doesn't just raise capital for itself. It sets a reference price for every company in the same category that follows. Investors who participated in the SpaceX IPO are now sitting on a 32% loss from the intraday high reached just five days after listing. Those investors, the same institutional buyers that would anchor any OpenAI IPO roadshow, are now holding a bruise. That bruise changes their pricing behavior for the next deal.

OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in a March funding round. Altman's $1 trillion IPO target represents an 18% premium over that number. In a strong market with AI sentiment at peak, that premium is achievable. In a market where the most celebrated AI-adjacent IPO of the decade has already retraced 32% from its high, it is a much harder argument to make to institutional buyers sitting in a room being asked to write nine-figure checks.

CFO Sarah Friar, who has been advocating for the delay, has cited massive ongoing cash burn, compute infrastructure commitments, and the burden of public reporting requirements as reasons to wait. All three are legitimate. But the SpaceX precedent is the freshest wound.

While OpenAI deliberates, one company moved first.

Anthropic confidentially filed for its IPO on June 1, a week before OpenAI announced its own filing. Anthropic raised its last funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, briefly overtaking OpenAI in private-market valuation for the first time. The company has publicly said its IPO will depend on market conditions.

That matters. In a constrained IPO window, being first means capturing demand from investors who want AI exposure and haven't yet been burned by the previous deal. It means setting the reference price rather than being priced against someone else's. And it means the narrative, which company is building the most credible AI product, favors whoever defines the category in the public market before the other one arrives.

The irony is sharp. OpenAI created ChatGPT, defined the modern AI era, and spent three years as the unquestioned market leader. Its IPO was supposed to be the climactic public moment for the entire industry. Instead, Altman's insistence on a trillion-dollar valuation may have handed Anthropic a chance to get there first.

OpenAI's financials are more complicated. The company generates approximately $2 billion per month in revenue. It also burns capital at a scale that puts it in perpetual fundraising mode. It recently began a structural conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, a transition that creates legal and governance complexity that public market investors will need to price. And the Trump administration has asked it to stagger the release of its next major model, GPT-5.6, through a government-approved customer-by-customer preview process, citing national security concerns over frontier AI capabilities.

That last detail, government involvement in how OpenAI can release its own products, is not a small asterisk in a public company's risk factors. It is a fundamental question about how much operational autonomy a publicly listed OpenAI would actually have.

The AI trade that made the Mag 7 soar is starting to crack.

Overpriced giants like Nvidia, Tesla, and Amazon are facing slowing returns — just as smaller, lesser-known names are positioning to take market share.

Waiting could be costly.

Three under-the-radar AI stocks are already showing the potential to outperform the Mag 7 in 2026.

Make sure these alternatives are on your radar before markets open tomorrow.

Get the names and tickers here.

What are you watching first: whether SpaceX finds a floor, or whether Anthropic announces its IPO timing?

Until then, sip slowly! 

The Market Sip Desk