Today, Explained - AI goes IPO

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Some of the richest companies on Earth want your money. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are racing to raise as much of it as possible by going public. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. SpaceX's Starship 39 rocket launching from Starbase during the 12th test flight. Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT / AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Big news this week for all my Gordon Geckos, my Robin Hooders, my Claude Squad Anthropic, which is newly the most valuable AI company in SeWorld, announced it would be going public. That news follows reporting that Open AI plans to go public as soon as September, and that that news follows reporting that Space X, which also considers itself an AI company, will be going public in maybe just a few weeks from now. Welcome to the era of the Omega IPO. We are about to see millionaires, billionaires, and yes, probably even the world's first trillionaire created overnight. And yes, it's that guy.

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Change saw. But all the tech bros who are going to make all the money, they need our money way more than we need their products. And we're going to remind you why on today, Explain from Vox. Support for this show comes from Norwegian Cruise Line. A cruise with Norwegian is a vacation you'll never forget, with an onboard experience that makes it easy for the whole family to settle into their own version of vacation.

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No, just introduce it like you're introducing the show. Like, this is Today Explained. Ah, got it. This is Today Explained. Okay, so all the big AI companies are going to IPO, even the one that you previously thought was a spaceship company. And their IPO is the one we know the most about. So we asked Tim Higgins, who writes about Elon, and... and SpaceX for the Wall Street Journal to help us separate the facts from the fantasy of this company. Absolutely, this is about this bright future that Musk is selling. And for a lot of people, they also hope they can make a lot of money. If you want institutional access to SpaceX, click the link in my bio. I'd love to chat. SpaceX is going public.

Should you invest? This is going to make the market pretty entertaining for the next coming weeks. Giving some credence to some of the... is the success that Musk has had with Tesla. Another company that when it was created and went public in 2010, there were a lot of people who were like, yeah, yeah, right. A startup car company selling electric cars, the likelihood of success seemed very unlikely.

When would you say you could reassure investors that you'll turn a profit? You've lost $290 million since the company started in 2003. you've yet to turn a profit. When do you expect that to happen? No, that's a good question. You don't want to own this stock. You shouldn't even rent the darn thing. It was many years of struggle for Tesla.

But eventually it came through and became the world's most valuable car company. Well, big losses on Wall Street today, as we've been reporting, and it's just the same for just about any U.S. stock, except what? Tesla motors. And those investors who hung on for that wild ride, saw a lot of returns. I have the stock market big. What investments?

Tesla. Just trade Tesla. There's people who kind of believe that Musk can keep doing this and keep performing. How does the SpaceX IPO compare to the Tesla IPO? Dramatically different. This time around, there is the power of the Musk brand around SpaceX. SpaceX has clearly shown that it can make private space travel. It has developed reusable rockets.

It is the largest satellite launcher out there. It has created a satellite business of a Starlink that provides broadband fast internet around the world. Starlink is space-based internet. So we've got a constellation of satellites. We've got to now well over 2,000 satellites. There's a business there. Now, the company overall is not profitable because it's spending a lot of money on these shiny, bright things for the future, whether they're giant spaceships or AI. When you buy into SpaceX, you're buying into three businesses. The rocket launches, Starlink's, and XAI.

The Starlink business is pretty amazing, bringing in $11 billion. But the XAI business is burning through $2.5 billion every single quarter. So you have one business carrying the losses of the other segment. The AI side is burning cash at a pace that dwarfs everything. else in the company. So that's why they need the money and this IPO hopes to raise way more money than Tesla ever could have imagined back in 2010. The expectations are potentially $80 billion or more that would come into the company that it needs for these grand ambitions. And where will those billions of dollars go immediately? Starship is their giant spaceship that they have been developing. We recently saw a test launch

Ignition. This is where our booster experiences a meltdown. This thing still has some work it needs, and it's kind of the linchpin of the strategy for SpaceX going into the future here. This giant spaceship that will take tons and tons of materials to help set up a moon base. It's part of NASA's programming.

It is the vehicle that Musk has said will take humanity to Mars. Yeah, we're aiming. for ultimately thousands of shifts to be built per year, which is what's needed in order to construct a city on Mars that is self-sustaining. So that's all going to be very costly. The other big bucket of money that Musk needs is for putting into AI. Part of the kind of the pivot of SpaceX in the past few months is acquiring XAI. SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, has absorbed the billionaires' artificial intelligence startup X-A-I.

The next step beyond Earth data centers is our Earth orbital data centers. He envisions this world where data centers will be in outer space. And ultimately, we see a path to maybe launching as much as a terawatt per year of compute from Earth. And data centers are the cornerstone of developing and running AI. And he thinks there's a huge business there in outer space. So getting data centers and outer space is going to be costly. Just developing AI is costly because of all the compute that's needed.

So there's not a shortage of places that Musk wants to spend money. I want to underline something you just said, Tim. This company is not profitable. Now, I'm no day trader or anything like that, but I believe investing, in a company that's not profitable, it can be a risky venture. Obviously, when a company goes public, we get to have a greater understanding of its books. Have you taken a look at any of these books yet? Are there any flags of a certain color that you could tell us about? There are a lot of red flags. The business perhaps is not growing as fast as some had expected. The losses are

bigger than expected. AI loss from operations for 2025 increased by about $4.8 billion to $6.4 billion. But the thing that is probably worrisome to most is the way that the company is structured, the power. A lot of power here is going to be centered on Elon Musk. He will control 85% of the voting power, which is rather remarkable. It essentially means that he, his power is, unquestionable. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.

Chainsaw! There are some other maneuvers within the corporate governance that will make it hard for shareholders to sue if they don't like things. It'll be very hard

to really have the kind of voice that they might have at other publicly traded companies. You know, when we talk about data centers in space. It reminds me of a recent show we did on humanoid robots and what feels like empty promises Elon Musk has made there. He thinks that Optimus, which is the name of Tesla's robot, is going to be, you know, he makes all sorts of wild claims. It's going to be the most productive, the most profitable product ever invented. I think everyone on Earth is going to have one

and going to want one. It reminds me of a show less recently we made about Mars and empty promises Elon Musk has made there. I totally disagree with Musk on the timeline. Elon Musk has said that his company, SpaceX, can get humans to Mars as early as 2029. How much of this feels like realistic versus, you know, snake oil? The thing about Elon Musk over the years is that a lot of the things he talks about are based in the potential of being real, right? or the timelines span way longer than he ever anticipated

or his fans anticipated or his investors expected. And that is part of kind of the inherent drama around SpaceX going public is how much of what he is promising or proposing or painting this future will come true. This IPO is just pure hype. You're not buying SpaceX because of the fundamentals. You're just buying it because of the hype. This post is an examination of the SpaceX filing. To be blunt, it's a train wreck, unsurious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest.

Some of these things are clearly way out there, literally, Mars. And if he is successful in setting up a city on Mars that has a million people, he will be handsomely rewarded. Musk is already very close to becoming the world's first trillionaire. And just to kind of put that in a perspective, no one is really close to him at all at this point. He used to be, it was like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and some others were kind of batting back and forth for who was the richest person since the increased valuation of SpaceX in the last year or so it's really been rocket fuel to his wealth. Musk's pay package could be worth up to $737 billion. A whopping 200 million shares of stock. As long as the colony is permanent, has at least one million residents,

and SpaceX has hit a market valuation of $7.5 trillion. I mean, the bigger thing for him is the money gives him control, right? He wants to have control over these companies. You know, according to people I've talked to over the years, He wants his companies to change humanity, put their mark on kind of our existence. Tesla was an initial gamble to show that electric cars could be cool and be sustainable and to kind of push the automotive industry to the electrification of the automobile. And SpaceX was created in large part around a similar idea of igniting a renewed excitement around the potential of traveling to the stars. Now, he does like some of the side benefits, right?

Being the world's richest man does have some benefits. He would say that the money is really just the power to do these things, to create more value, and try to make sci-fi dreams possible. Tim Niggins wrote a book about Elon. It's called PowerPlay, Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century. When we're back, we're going to talk about the other AI POs, Open AI Anthropic, what it'll all mean for you, that kind of thing. Support for today, explained, comes from Bamba's Spring is here, perhaps, you're going outside, running, walking, just to get active again. It's the perfect time to upgrade your everyday go-toes with Bambas.

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Liz Lapato writes about big tech and big bros at The Verge. We asked her why these three companies are all going public kind of at the exact same time. Well, I think there's sort of, this race that's been going on that people have been talking about in the finance world between SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And part of that is there's like this kind of fear that if you don't go public at the right time or you don't go public first, investors aren't going to wait for you. And so, you know, whoever goes public first is going to scoop up better investors or have an easier time convincing investors. And so that sort of like is fueling. And so that sort of like is, is fueling this kind of rush towards the market. So that's thing one. But thing two is that AI is

extremely expensive. And I think that's something that people often forget about because right now we're sort of in like the early days of Uber thing where like you're using this very expensive tool for free. And then they're going to try to get you hooked on it so that you'll pay like real prices later on. So in order to get the money that you need for compute to build all of these data centers, to do all of the things that you need to do in order to have these, you know, frontier models, That's just like it's an incredibly capital-intensive business. And so, you know, one way to get capital is to go public. SpaceX plans to go public, then it could be the biggest IPO of all time.

OpenAI is reportedly laying the groundwork for a potential IPO that could value the company at $1 trillion. Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO with the SEC. Anthropic has had some better discipline than the other. companies in terms of like behaving like actual adults. So they might actually tell us a little bit less before it happens than we've heard from, for instance, SpaceX. Tell me more about behaving like adults when it comes to IPOs, which feels like a very adult thing to do.

There are sort of a lot of things that come into play with an IPO. And basically what you're doing is you are setting out what your company is, what the The company's vision is how you plan to make money and what you're going to do with all the money that you're raising in the IPO, right? And for SpaceX, there's a bunch of nonsense about Mars in there that doesn't really feel real to me. Our innovations and technological advancements are redefining industries on Earth while we aim to create new ones on the moon, Mars, and beyond. Artist visualization of life on Mars. Build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe,

and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. There's nothing about, like, you know, the biological risks of going to Mars, for instance, in the risk factors, which if that were a real thing, like, you'd see it. One of the things that's been notable is that both anthropic and open AI seem to have better businesses based on what we know. like, oh, Anthropic is actually about to make a profit, or Anthropic in particular, didn't make images with its AI. It stuck to text, and it focused in specifically on programming.

And, like, it's not a sexy business. It's enterprise software. But you don't have to be sexy to make money. Just looking at, like, sort of the difference between, like, the flash we're seeing about, like, spreading the light of human consciousness. among the stars and like actually making money, which is the point of a company, I would say that Anthropics seems like it's run by adults by comparison, yeah. And then I would put Open AI somewhere in the middle.

Yeah, why? What is Open AI doing that isn't very adult-like behavior? Open AI as a business is really scattered, right? Like they created and shut down SORA, which was AI-generated videos. They have these AI image generators that have created a whole new level of headache. for them. They're embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Open AI is being accused of playing a role in a deadly mass shooting at Florida State University in April of last year. At least seven families are suing tech giant Open AI, claiming that its chat GPT program drove people to suicide and harmful delusions.

Sam Altman, the CEO, was running it effectively as a startup composed of like little startups within it and was like, oh, well, we'll just see which one of them wins. And like, that's maybe not the best way to run a company. It's a fine way to run a portfolio, but a company is not a portfolio. Liz, you're very tapped into this world out there in Silicon Valley, and you were at the trial between Altman and Musk, and it sounds like these companies are all being talked about in the same breath, even though two of them are very specifically AI companies and one of them wants to colonize Mars. Why is that? Is it just because they all may IPO soon? I think that's part of it. I also think that's

there's been this investment thesis that Frontier AI models are effectively going to be a boom on the scale of like Internet 1.0, if you remember 1999. This is sort of the moment where we're going to find out who's Google and who's Amazon and who's Pets.com, right? Fets.com because pets can't drive. And so I think that's why people are talking about them in this way, because it's not just these three companies that are AI companies. You know, like, obviously Google has an AI arm that is very good. But then you have companies like Databricks, which you maybe haven't heard of. Can't say I know her. Yeah. This is a perfectly fine company. It's got a business. But it's sort of not in that conversation because I don't think people expect it to be like one of the behemoths and the way that they're sort of looking at these three as like the potential behemoths.

of this generation of technology. This reminds me that, you know, when social media companies went public, they started prioritizing things like shareholder profit rather than safety. I think Facebook meta, probably the most prominent example of this. Do we want the still mostly dudes holding our future in their hands to be beholden to market forces and profits above all else? arguably they already are. I mean, this is, you know, one of the arguments that has been made about OpenAI is that like the reason that they are a little more,

the reason they've had some of these issues around safety has been because they are motivated by chasing the market and like trying to raise money. Because unlike social media, this is a very capital intensive business. Like this is, you need to be showing investors something. You need to be proving yourself out in a way that you didn't necessarily. necessarily have to with social media right off the bat. So I think that's part of it, but I think that going public potentially makes that worse. The chatbot will try to keep you engaged. And so, like, it'll give you an answer and then it'll ask a tag question.

And, like, that's an engagement tool that keeps you engaged with the AI. Would you like me to come up with three options for you? If you tell me what kind of pain or symptom you're treating, I can help explain which option is generally more appropriate. If you'd like, I can draft a concise outreach email. And like, you see that also with some of the sycophantic behavior you see with these AI where they're like, wow, that's such a smart question. Gee, you're so bright. That's the right question to be asking at this stage.

Before deciding, that's exactly what I'd want to understand. That's a crucial consideration. And like, is that really good for us? I don't think it is. But, you know, it does keep people involved and it does keep people engaged with the AI. And if you need to be, you know, showing user numbers or otherwise, like showing metrics to investors. Those are the ones you show.

It seems almost silly to ask that if being a publicly traded company could make these companies more accountable or, you know, even safer. But then again, if you think about Anthropic and their whole dust up with the Pentagon, without being publicly traded, they said, you know,

you guys are crossing the red line and we have to like reassess our relationship. Defense Secretary Pete Higsef wants to use Anthropics' AI model, Claude, for quote, all lawful purposes. Anthropic, though, has been very clear. It's a hard no when it comes to using its AI technology for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. So do you think something about

being publicly traded post-IPO could make a company like Anthropic, OpenAI, a little bit I don't know, more conservative in their developments and their technology. So to the degree that you can say, like, hey, like, I was misled by this company as a shareholder because they told me there were these safety practices that actually were not in play and then take them to court. That is something that can be done, sure, unless you're talking about SpaceX, which has a governance structure that effectively, bars shareholder suits unless you have a specific percentage of holding. So not SpaceX, but maybe anthropic, maybe Open AI have this additional measure of accountability where like shareholder

lawsuits can potentially move the needle. But most likely of all, we just start to see a lot more ads. Yeah. I think that's right. I think you also see prices go up for the enterprise products and maybe for all of the other products as well. Read Liz at the verge.com. Her latest and greatest is titled, The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you. Peter Ballin-on-Rosen made the show. Jolie Myers edited.

Gabriel Dunatav has wants and needs. David Tadashore mixed. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Happy birthday, Patrick Boyd.