A historic IPO is on the horizon, with SpaceX's $75 billion offering set to make a significant impact on the market. The company has filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, aiming for a $1.75 trillion valuation. If successful, this will be the largest stock-market debut in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion record in 2019.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are also planning to go public, with valuations nearing $1 trillion and $60 billion, respectively. The combined capital raise of over $240 billion from June to year-end is expected to exceed every venture-backed US IPO since 2000. This massive influx of capital may drain the liquidity that has been supporting bitcoin and crypto, potentially leading to a downturn in the market.
As one expert notes, 'After the SpaceX IPO, I think you start to get very bearish equities,' drawing parallels to the Solana $300 moment. The mechanical setup of these large listings, concentrated in a six-month window, may trigger index-driven flows, sector-rotation effects, and a compression of liquidity in non-tech assets.
Crypto, being part of the same risk-on liquidity pool as tech and AI equities, may be affected by the rotation of speculative capital out of equities and into IPO allocations. The historical parallel with Coinbase's IPO in 2021, which marked the peak of the last bitcoin cycle, is a point of concern.
The lesson learned from that experience is that institutional milestones often mark tops rather than starting lines, as the capital that chases these milestones is the same capital that was previously holding up the asset. With SpaceX's IPO, two key features connect directly to crypto flows: the 30% retail allocation, which is three times the typical retail share, and the company's material bitcoin position, disclosed under the new fair-value accounting rules. The testable signal going forward will be whether crypto can hold up through the roadshow window in May and June or begins to drift lower as allocators free up room for the SpaceX subscription.