Predicting the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs — With Dick Costolo

TL;DR

• 1

  SpaceX may get the easiest IPO ride — Dick Costolo says Elon Musk’s retail-investor narrative machine could push SpaceX above $2 trillion on day one because limited float plus huge demand can overpower near-term valuation math.

• 2

  OpenAI has the hardest story to defend — Unlike Musk’s future-facing promises, Sam Altman has attached real dollar commitments to compute and data centers, leaving CFO Sarah Friar and the team to explain how more than $1 trillion in obligations maps to revenue and eventual profitability.

• 3

  Anthropic could be the market’s ‘cleanest’ AI IPO — Costolo sees Dario Amodei’s enterprise-first focus, Claude Code’s strong reputation, and a steadier narrative as making Anthropic the most straightforward long-term bet of the three.

• 4

  Going public changes the internal psychology overnight — Costolo’s advice to first-time IPO CEOs is to explicitly prepare employees for irrational 15–20% stock swings on days when ‘nothing particularly happened,’ because that whiplash can destabilize a company fast.

• 5

  The real risk may be politics, not just pricing — Costolo thinks the biggest threat to AI giants is a bipartisan backlash against data centers, citing local opposition, the Utah project controversy, and polling showing 7 in 10 Americans don’t want these facilities nearby.

• 6

  Silicon Valley’s AI boom is creating a visible class divide — He reacts to the idea that roughly 10,000 people at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Nvidia, and Meta may have hit $20M-plus wealth while many other engineers now fear their skills are commoditized and their upside is gone.