r/investing Mar 15, 07:45 PM
The Year of IPOs. A Deep Dive. Hey Guys :)
With multiple record breaking IPOs happening this year, I thought I would take a few hours to publish a piece about IPOs. In the end, it took me dozens of hours to research, write and edit.
I would greatly appreciate if you guys read and give thoughts, sorry about the lack of pictures and graphs, and a bunch of footnotes are missing as it is originally written for Substack. Think it has some valuable content about whether this years IPOs are a good potential investment!
Thank you in advance for reading and would love to hear thoughts.
The Year of IPOs.
2026 will likely see four of the five largest IPOs in history. SpaceX and xAI’s combined merger may likely become the largest IPO ever as they are currently valued at $1.75 trillion. Next come the LLM giants, both OpenAI and Anthropic are currently planning to go public this year with a combined value of $1.2 trillion dollars between them. Finally come Stripe and DataBricks, both valued at well over $100 billion dollars which would put them comfortably among the top seven public listings in history. Overall, there will likely be over $3,000,000,000,000 added into the stock market through these five companies. Do IPO’s outperform the market historically? Are these companies good investments? What is the historic precedent for massive IPOs? All these are important questions that we will go over in this article.
This piece took me dozens of hours to research, edit and publish. If you do enjoy it, please consider subscribing. Thank you :)
What is an IPO?
An Initial Public Offering or an IPO for short is when a company goes public on the stock market after a period of private funding. This allows those who have invested early into the company to monetize and potentially sell out of their investment and at the same time allowing new investors to invest in companies that were previously unreachable to them. Investing after a company goes public is both risky and can potentially give massive returns. Some companies go public relatively early, like Apple who went public only four years after the company was founded while others take much longer, like Goldman Sachs which was founded in 1869 and only went public in 1999.
The Companies:
Before we begin to look at whether investing into these companies is a good idea, it’s important to do a brief explanation about the companies.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk and it is an investment into space future. They design, manufacture and launch advanced rockets that go to the atmosphere and to Mars. In addition, its Starlink system which provides high speed internet using satellites is its main revenue stream, reporting over $10 billion in revenue in 2025. Recently, SpaceX merged with xAI which has changed them from only a space play to a AI/Space/Data conglomerate. With SpaceX you get to invest in the future while also having a tangible revenue stream today. Next, are OpenAI and Anthropic, two large language models (LLM) founded in 2015