Anthropic Just Gave Investors One More Reason To Avoid the SpaceX IPO

2026 is shaping up to be the biggest year for IPOs in stock market history.

SpaceX is lined up to go public as soon as next week, targeting June 12 as its debut date. Anthropic just filed confidentially to go public, meaning that it could hit the markets in just a couple of months, and OpenAI is targeting an IPO by the end of the year.

SpaceX is the only one of the three to have revealed its financial results in its S-1 prospectus, giving investors key insights into the company, but shortly after that, Anthropic announced a major funding round and declared its own intentions to go public.

Anthropic also shared some information that should put the SpaceX IPO into perspective for investors. Before we discuss that, let's take a look at what investors should know about the SpaceX IPO.

Image source: Getty Images.

SpaceX shoots for the moon

In its public offering, SpaceX is reportedly aiming to raise roughly $75 billion at a valuation of $2 trillion, which would make it the biggest market debut in history. Not only that, a market cap of $2 trillion would make SpaceX the seventh-most valuable company in the country.

However, SpaceX significantly trails the leading big tech companies in key financial metrics like revenue and profit, meaning it's targeting a much higher valuation than the Magnificent Seven stocks that trade at that level.

Over the last four quarters, SpaceX has generated $19.3 billion in revenue, and in the first quarter, its revenue grew just 15%. Based on its trailing revenue, the stock trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 100, making it much more expensive than the Magnificent Seven or any S&P 500 stock.

The company is also unprofitable on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis due in large part to its acquisition of xAI, the AI business that includes the Grok AI chatbot and the X social media platform. In the first quarter, it reported a GAAP operating loss of $1.9 billion, and its AI segment had a loss of $2.5 billion due to costs associated with R&D and spending on GPUs, cloud computing, and data center infrastructure.

xAI vs Anthropic

SpaceX merged with xAI in February in a deal that valued legacy SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion.

In the first quarter, xAI, now SpaceX's AI segment, generated $818 million in revenue, meaning at the time xAI was valued at roughly 80 times run rate sales. However, considering that SpaceX is targeting a valuation of more than 50% above what it was valued at in the merger, its price-to-sales ratio would now be 120 or higher.

Anthropic, on the other hand, just closed a $65 billion funding round that valued it at $965 billion. At the same time, the company said that its run rate revenue was $47 billion earlier in the month, and that its revenue was more than doubling. Additionally, the company said it was on track to deliver its first quarterly operating profit, targeting an operating profit of $559 million on $10.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter.

Comparing Anthropic to xAI, it's clear that Anthropic is head-and-shoulders above its SpaceX-owned peer in terms of revenue growth, profitability, AI model capability, and valuation. Based on its run rate revenue of $47 billion, Anthropic trades at a price-to-sales ratio of just around 20, much lower than both xAI and SpaceX.

What it means for SpaceX

SpaceX is much more than xAI, and most investors are probably more intrigued by the space exploration business or Starlink than xAI.

But the peer comparison with Anthropic makes it look like both xAI and SpaceX are considerably overvalued. Despite SpaceX's potential with futuristic ideas like orbital data centers and colonizing Mars, the company today is relatively small and growing slowly, at least compared to peers of a similar valuation.

With Anthropic set to go public shortly after SpaceX, investors are better off passing on the SpaceX IPO and waiting for Anthropic. Of the two, the Claude parent looks like the much better value.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.