A historic stock market debut is imminent, with SpaceX's $75 billion IPO expected to draw interest from the same liquidity pool as crypto. The company filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation.
If successful, it will be the largest stock market debut in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion record. SpaceX is not alone, as OpenAI and Anthropic are also planning to go public, potentially raising over $60 billion and $1 trillion respectively. The combined capital raise of over $240 billion could exceed every venture-backed US IPO since 2000.
This massive influx of capital could lead to a rotation out of equities and into these new listings, potentially triggering a bearish trend in the market. Crypto sits in the same risk-on liquidity pool as tech and AI equities, and the historical parallel with Coinbase's IPO in 2021 is a point of concern.
When speculative capital leaves equities for an IPO allocation, some of what leaves is the same capital that would otherwise bid up higher-beta assets, including crypto. The 30% retail allocation in SpaceX's IPO could also impact crypto flows, as it will draw interest away from memecoins, altcoins, and bitcoin. Furthermore, SpaceX's material bitcoin position, worth roughly $600 million, makes its IPO the first public-market debut of a company with a disclosed bitcoin position under the new fair-value accounting rules. The testable signal going forward is whether crypto holds up through the roadshow window in May and June or begins to drift lower as allocators free up room for the SpaceX subscription.
A bitcoin rally that extends through the roadshow suggests the spot-ETF bid has decoupled crypto from broader risk-on flows. Whether crypto treats the lesson as learned or learns it again will be visible in the tape starting roughly six weeks from now.