SpaceX Becomes a $2T Public Company and Mints the First Trillionaire as Washington Pulls Anthropic's Top Models Offline

Funding & M&A

• SpaceX priced 555.6 million shares at $135 to raise $75 billion in the largest IPO ever, then opened at $150 on the Nasdaq and closed up 19% at $160.95, briefly touching $176 and a ~$2.3 trillion market cap intraday. The debut made Elon Musk—who holds about 85.1% of voting power—the world's first trillionaire, and the NYT reports roughly 4,400 current and former employees will become millionaires (about 400 centimillionaires). The offering was oversubscribed 4x with only ~4% of shares as float, while CFO Bret Johnsen, hired in 2011 explicitly to take the company public, saw his stake top $1.4 billion. It matters because the demand, index inclusion fast-tracking, and Musk's retail following set up an unusually momentum-driven stock atop a business that lost $4.9 billion on $18.7 billion of 2025 revenue (over $37 billion lost since inception). ^[37][52][61]
• Tesla-merger speculation intensified as COO Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC a SpaceX-Tesla tie-up 'might make Elon's life a little easier,' and SpaceX amended its S-1 to warn it 'may issue a significant amount of equity in connection with future transactions'—language analysts read as a dilution signal pointing toward Tesla (market cap ~$1.52 trillion). The IPO also enriched early backers: Founders Fund's $600 million stake (3%) is estimated at more than $50 billion, Sequoia's at over $20 billion, and Andreessen Horowitz's at more than $10 billion, while Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley led banks that collected roughly $500 million in fees. AI is central to the SpaceX story too, following its $1.25 trillion all-stock acquisition of xAI and compute deals in which Anthropic and Google agreed to pay $1.25 billion and $920 million per month, respectively, for capacity. The episode shows Musk consolidating his portfolio into what amounts to a tech conglomerate sold to retail investors. ^{[37][52][61][67][68][63]}
• Outside the IPO frenzy, startup fundraising stayed brisk during June 6–12, led in the US by Austin-based IT-management firm NinjaOne's $400 million Series C extension at a $12.3 billion valuation (revenue up over 70% in 2025, profitable in Q1). Other notable US rounds included blockchain provider Digital Asset ($355 million led by a16z crypto), AMD-focused AI cloud firm TensorWave ($350 million), Beren Therapeutics ($300 million), and AI-robotics maker Standard Bots ($200 million at a $1 billion valuation). The week's largest deals globally were European: Germany's Neura Robotics raised up to $1.4 billion (Series C) and Finland's Iceye landed $520 million at a valuation over $12 billion. The breadth—robotics, blockchain, biotech, cloud and space—signals capital is flowing well beyond pure LLM plays even amid the AI boom. ^[70]