The Breakdown - SpaceX Just Became the Most Valuable Post-IPO Company Ever

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

It's SpaceX IPO day, and it’s on track to be the most valuable post-IPO company in history — $1.77T, surpassing Saudi Aramco. David walks through the numbers, the pre-IPO trade on Hyperliquid, and why the edge wore off months ago. Plus: Nakamoto selling Bitcoin while Tom Lee's BitMine keeps stacking ETH, and where prediction market volumes are during the NBA Finals. TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (01:08) SpaceX IPO (07:27) Treasury Companies (15:47) Prediction Markets FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW › The Breakdown Newsletter — https://blockworks.com/newsletter/the-breakdown Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to the Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

It is Friday, June the 12th. Welcome back to the breakdown. I'm your host, David Canales. It is SpaceX IPO Day. So we're going to be taking a look at that first this morning. We're also going to be looking at treasury companies. We've covered a lot of spot ETFs lately in the past few episodes, past few weeks. We're looking at treasury companies specifically because, yeah, Nakamoto is selling Bitcoin,

while BitMine, Tom Lee's Ether treasury company is still stacking. So we'll take a look at what's happening there. We're also going to cover prediction markets. ahead of, I mean, we're in the middle of the final series for the NBA and also warming up into the World Cup. A prediction market's popping off, we're going to be take a look at why there might might be and why there might not be. So enough jibba jabba, as I like to say, let's get to it. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone

on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Okay, so let's just spend a few minutes talking about SpaceX again on hyperliquid. But before that, I just have some key stats. I'm just pulling from business inside of this morning. Apparently, there was $100 billion worth of orders submitted from retail investors going into today's IPO. So today's going to be some fireworks.

It's going to be very interesting watching this play out. I'm recording this a few hours before trade opens. And you're going to probably be listening to this as the shares start to trade publicly for the first time. So we're all going to be watching this together. But right now, the post-IPO valuation of SpaceX will make it the most valuable post-IPO company in history, beating out Saudi Aramco, which was $1.7 trillion. SpaceX is going to be $1.77 trillion.

So not too shabby there for the big man Elon Musk. He's set to be the world's first trillioner once today's trade closes and we finalize what his net worth is actually going to be. SpaceX is on track to make $75 billion from the IPO. which is genuinely huge. Saudi Aramco raised 29.4 billion. So, yeah, SpaceX is more than doubling what Saudi Aramco made. After that, it was Alibaba made 21 billion. SoftBank made 21.4 billion. NTT Mobile made 18 billion.

BlackRock itself put in an order for $5 billion. And so to put that into context, Cerebrus made $5.55 billion overall from its IPO. BlackRock put in an order that almost beat that alone for SpaceX's IPO. So a lot happening here with SpaceX today, no doubt. I've got up on my screen the pre-stock hyperliquid market for SpaceX's IPO. And you see the price normalizing just above the $135 initial list price or initial share price that SpaceX set itself.

So as you can see, we did see some. volatility rising up this time last month. So it looks like pre-IPO stocks, at least on hyperliction, can get ahead of themselves somewhat. But ultimately, at least in SpaceX's case, it has normalized around what everyone else is paying for it. So whatever edge was available for retail to gain access through crypto rails, that edge effectively wore off. I mean, in late February. you had to have really gotten in October, November, December, maybe January to get any kind

of edge on what everyone else is going to pay for SpaceX shares moving forward. So I guess there's something to read there that if you did want to, I mean the primary use case that has been touted for pre-IPO stocks is on crypto rails is giving retail an opportunity to get profit where normally they wouldn't, but you still have to be month. months early to the IPO in order to see that convert into any real sizable advantage in terms of price. So that's interesting. What I also find interesting jumping off SpaceX for a second.

I mean, I have up on my screen now the OpenAI pre-IPO stocks. And you can see that since over the past two weeks, three weeks, basically, the shares have been on a downward trajectory. Well, they're now at 1,200 a share, at least on hyperliquid, whereas at their peak, it was close It was at 2000 at their peak in early May, this time last month. So we're seeing a big retracement in the valuation of OpenAI, pre-IPO valuation, at least in terms of what the market is saying. The share price awarded to the pre-stocks awards OpenAI a market cap of $1.24 trillion.

But the same thing is happening for Anthropics. So I'm going to now share Anthropics chart. And you can see that, again, huge drop-off. at least in the past two weeks. We're looking at originally two weeks ago, 963. It's now at 705. And that gives a stock market valuation of Anthropic of $1.57 trillion. So Anthropic is a little bit ahead of OpenAI right now

in terms of its pre-stock IPO valuation according to hyperliquid users. But, I mean, this is quite interesting considering Anthropic has just released Fable. And you know, and you would think that if FABO really, did move the needle in terms of what its material valuation could be when it eventually goes public later in the year, then maybe we would see some positive trend if the market likes what Fable is doing. But that's not the case. The market is actually turning on Anthropic right now, at least in terms of this quite relatively small market, I would say. I mean, I think there's only maybe eight or 9,000 addresses that are actively trading Anthropic pre-stock on hyperliquid. So to take from that

what you will. But I would say what this is a reflection is perhaps not. so much the market turning on anthropic and open AI, but more just the SpaceX IPO sucking a lot of the air and interest out of the room. Perhaps people are rotating out of their anthropic and open AI positions to get ready to perhaps buy the volatility on today's, when the market opens today for SpaceX. I would say that, but it's not like Anthropic is mooning in response to its most recent release of Fable, which, you know, it could be for a lot of reason. Perhaps we'll analyze that in an episode next week. But in any case, this kind of gives an overview of what's happening right now in the pre-stock IPO market.

And again, I have the Blockworth Research Portal open here and we can see the, this is the total addresses that are holding pre-stock issued tokens. When you see that SpaceX is at least on a relative tear, it's added about 400 new addresses in the past couple of days, reaching an all-time high of almost 12,000 addresses trading SpaceX. I said it was 8,000 addresses holding anthropic pre-stock is actually under 5,000 right now. Open AI has a touch over 4,000. So still some interest percolating there. But yeah, let's see how today goes with SpaceX and it's interest. And we would likely see liquidity return and more interest return to Anthropic and Open AI pre-stocks

once today's craziness is over. So, okay, on to the next one. Okay, so it's not just strategy that's selling Bitcoin in terms of Bitcoin treasury companies. Also, Nakamoto has strengthened its balance sheet. by selling 600 Bitcoin refinancing and authorizing a buyback scheme and authorizing share buybacks. So this is in Bitcoin magazine, which is, of course, owned by Nakamoto. It says that the company retired $45 million in outstanding debt through the repayment of a portion of its loan with Paywood Interactive doing businesses crack.

And Nakamoto funded the repayment by selling approximately 600 Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related derivative positions, which generate approximately $48 million in net proceeds. So, I mean, I just want to point out the irony here of a company called Nakamoto, which, I mean, Satoshi's never sold a Bitcoin at all, then being forced to strengthen its balance sheet by selling Bitcoin, which I think that the opposite was meant to be true of treasury companies, is that you would strengthen your balance sheet by buying Bitcoin. But unfortunately, that isn't the case in terms of Nakamoto, at least.

And, of course, I mean, Nakamoto has been through a brutal market cycle, of course crashing, crashing immensely. Let's take a look at a stock market chart here. I have it on Google. And we can see, yeah, I mean, basically trading down to nothing in a spectacular fall and debt spiral effectively over the past year or so. What's interesting is that the shares initially popped about, I mean, there's headlines here that say Nakamoto popped 20% on news that it had strengthened its balance sheet by

figuring out how much. Bitcoin it really needs to hold in order to pay back its debt. But it also gave up about half of those returns during pre-market this morning, sinking 8, 8.5% this morning. So, I mean, some volatility there is to be expected with Nakamoto. But what I find interesting is that Nakamoto and also strategy they're selling Bitcoin and all that, while Bitmine, Tom Lee's Ether Treasury Company is still accumulating. I have some charts up here. And this is on the Blockworths Research portal, which has a treasury company's dashboard for Bitcoin and Ethereum and so on. In the blue here is Bitmine, Tom Lee's company, Treasury company. You can see just steady accumulation,

basically all throughout the past year or so. I mean, year and a half, about the past year, just effectively non-stop accumulation and still accumulating to the day. It's now holding over five and a half million, which is almost five percent of the supply, if my master, is correct. And of course, my bit mine stock is also struggling. It's down 47% year to date, despite the accumulation. But at least it is still accumulating. I'll have a look at some stats here. So right now it's accumulating between 150,000 to 350,000, to 350,000 eth per month. And that's a little bit down from December, or it was accumulated almost half a million. It accumulated almost half a million throughout December. But it is, on average, it could be

slightly more than what November was. So the accumulation is, it does slow down periodically while when the price of ether is rising. I'm going to show a chart to that effect as well. But something I find interesting is just the comparison between BitMine and strategy in terms of their accumulation. So I have this chart up on my screen. In orange is the US dollar value of the Bitcoin holdings of strategy.

While in green, I have the same for Ether of Bitmine. And you can see that, I mean, Bitmine has really exploded in its accumulation. And I'm going to show you another chart that just shows just how quickly Bitmine is accumulating ether, at least compared to what strategy was doing in the very beginning. But Bitmine's total US dollar value of its ether is about $9 billion right now compared to $52 billion for micro strategy. But what I find, you know, really interesting is that Bitmine has already, I mean, perhaps it's not used to you, but BitMine has already accumulated more of the current ether supply than the same metric for strategy has for Bitcoin.

You can see that in the green versus the orange here again. This is the percentage of the circulating supply hold of strategy to Bitcoin and Bitmine to ether. And the green line surpassed the orange line earlier this year and is now accelerating much faster than whatever strategy is doing. So that might tell you something about what the upward momentum might be for ether moving into the next ball market if indeed Bitmine continues to accumulate. I know that Tom Leah has said once it hits its target is 5% of the supply and it's very much nearing that. So let's TBD on whether he sticks to that and continues to accumulate past that 5% benchmark.

Right now it is at 4.59% of the supply. So at least have still some buys to go. And the next shot here on the right here is actually the accumulation speed comparing the first 337 days of strategies Bitcoin buying to Bitmine. And we can see that strategy started accumulating very slowly and of course ramped up once Sailor conceived of this financial engineering that meant to essentially ramp up like sell shares in order to fundraise to continue to buy. Bitmine is really outpacing that, at least in comparative terms from when they started. These lines are aligned to start from day zero of their accumulation strategy. So Bitmine is on a much faster pace comparative to what strategy was in the beginning, but of course strategy is still outsized in terms of its overall accumulation compared to Bitmine.

But that, I mean, that just might give you an idea of how radical Tom Lee has been in his accumulation strategy for ether. But of course, it hasn't really made a sizable dent in ether's price appreciation against Bitcoin, of course. We're going to pull that up in a second. So here we have the ETH-BTC ratio up on my screen and you can see that it's basically trended downwards all year. It's down 22% year to date. So while Tom Lee has been accumulated, it hasn't really made a material difference to at least upward momentum of the price of ether against Bitcoin. But just going back to these charts, just here. This shows the weekly USD deployment of BitMind versus strategy. And again,

strategy is in orange while BitMind is in green. And you see that strategy's deployment to buy Bitcoin is really, it's not sporadic, but it just happens in major bursts while BitMind is consistently adding week after week. But what's curious here is, and this is cumulative US dollar deployed since only, basically over the past year only. So in the past year, strategy is deployed $21.2 billion to buy Bitcoin, while Bitmine has deployed almost the same amount, 19.3 billion, to buy ether. So very similar spend. And Bitmine looks like it will almost catch up to strategy spend, at least over the past year, very soon. So very curious there. I mean, Bitmine is sinking a lot of money into the price of ether right now. Let's just hope that it actually pays off and this converts

to actually Tom Lee being the genius to be to be vindicated as the genius that he might be if these positions do pay off and we do see a material difference in the price of ether moving into the next ball market. And I know a lot of people are writing off ether as a dusty, dusty chain that doesn't understand business development, that doesn't understand product or whatever. I'm still not buying that personally. I think it's just hype narratives coming and going in. I would say a lot of the negative sentiment around Ethereum is just bare market vibes

are hitting the older chains while a lot of the younger, newer chains have a lot more newer entrance to the crypto space that might not understand that this essentially happens every single cycle and why would this time be different is going to my current take. So that gives you an overview of BitMind versus strategy. I know that I haven't really spoken about BitMind very much on the podcast so far. So this might give you a little bit of a little bit of context around that particular topic. In any case, all right, on to the next one. Okay, so just very quickly, I wanted to take a look at prediction market volumes,

particularly Kauci and Polly Market based on Blockworth's research data, because, yeah, I mean, the NBA finals are on. The World Cup is about to kick off. So this should be, you know, the Super Bowl, to for what of a better term, for prediction markets, at least crypto-related prediction markets. But I'm worried that it's actually, that actually Draft Kings is really eating the lunch.

of the crypto-enabled prediction markets, particularly Polymarket and Kashi, because I have up on my screen here the open interest for sports in general. The top chart here is Polymarket. So this is Polymarket open interest for blue in sports, orange the MPA championship, and green in the World Cup. And you see that the orange line is not really mooning at all. So the general open interest for the NBA finals is really staying very steady at about under 20 million,

about 20 million worth of open interest, at least from my read of the chart right now. Apologies if I'm screwing that up. The World Cup, though, is accelerating. The World Cup is about to kick off. I mean, I kicked off yesterday's. Please direct me if I'm wrong. So more interest in the World Cup than the NBA finals, at least on Polymarket, and that might say something about that Polymarket is just available in more countries

outside the US and soccer or football is much more popular outside the US. So perhaps that has something to do with it. But I would have expected the NBA finals to really accelerate the open interest on polymarket, but it's just not the case. The same thing is happening on Kaushi. I have this chart here that the Kauci basketball open interest, there was some jump here. The NBA Finals Games Day are in Orange,

but it's not like those are complete outliers. And in fact, the March Madness apparently had a much better impact than the NBA finals have had on Kaushy, which I find particularly curious. But again, the open interest on Kaushi is for the World Cup is also exploding. So World Cup seems to have a much bigger impact on open interest than the NBA final. So perhaps that says something about where the users really are at in terms of Polymarket, particularly versus Kashi.

But a more likely read to me is that Draft Kings is eating the lunch of Polymarket and Kauci. I mean, this is from a couple of days ago that Draft King's stock was soaring after reporting $1.3 billion in trading volume on its prediction markets. So perhaps that everyone is just opting to use Draft Kings rather than sign up specifically for Kaushi and Polymarket to get their prediction markets. What I find curious, I mean, this is from Robin Hood. They're saying that Draftkins and Fanduel have both struggled with Kowsey and Polly Market encroach on their customers with sports betting has been key to the growth of the prediction

markets, make up 30% of the total trailing volume on Kauci and 80% of the polymarket total since July 2024. But right now, I'm not really seeing that, at least in these latest sports events. So if you have a different read on that, please reach out to me. If you have some understanding of why we might not be seeing, particularly the NBA finals blow up on Polymarket and Kalshi, I'd be very curious to hear. Obviously, the World Cup is going to have a big impact on the trading volumes, only on the open interest, at least, and presumably the trading volumes as well.

because when I see the Polymarket World Cup winner open interest, you can see this has been building up all year, but still relatively small. I mean, we're only looking at $25 million worth of open interest on Polymarket for the World Cup winner. So it's not exactly at the levels of what the Trump election was doing on Polymarket, and perhaps this is still indicative that politics is still a bigger draw, at least on that venue.

But I just think that as Polymer, that as prediction markets mature and more, more platforms are offering prediction markets, that it might call into question really the growth engine available to particularly polymarket and kashi, just the competition, as competition heats up. And I don't just want to blindly extrapolate that into other parts of the market,

but as we see tradfai in Kumpets start trading, trading crypto more that perhaps this might also reflect similar, similar headwinds for the growth of, of things like Cracken and Coinbases, as more options become available for the general public to trade cryptocurrencies and trade perps and so on. So yeah, I mean, so let's just see how it works out, at least towards the end of the NBA finals. Perhaps we're going to see a last minute surge in prediction market, open interest and prediction market volumes. But I suppose the real thing to watch is the World Cup in terms of prediction markets and what impact that has on Polymarket and

Kaushi volumes. So that's enough out of me today. What a great Friday. What a great week. Good luck if you're looking at the SpaceX, SpaceX IPO, if you're participating in those markets today, it's going to be a wild one. I'm going to be watching closely. And I'm sure we'll do a recap on Monday or Wednesday next week. So in the meantime, look after yourselves. We'll see you next time.