Uzbekistan’s largest-ever public market transaction has highlighted growing investor interest in the country and its economic reforms, while shifting attention to the next stage of developing its financial markets.
The listing of the National Investment Fund of Uzbekistan, managed by Franklin Templeton, raised more money than all previous IPOs in the country combined over the past 30 years, according to Marius Dan, Central Asia CEO at Templeton Global Investments.
For investors and market operators, the transaction has drawn attention to a wider issue: how Uzbekistan develops the rules, institutions and market depth needed to support capital markets, debt financing, venture capital and private investment.
“What investors really want to know is that they’ll put their money in and that they will get their money back,” Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, told Euronews.
Hoggett said investors usually begin by looking at a country’s fundamentals, including currency stability, inflation, economic growth, population trends and assets, before turning to the regulatory environment.
Uzbekistan is preparing new financial legislation as it seeks to expand the range of financing available to companies and investors.
Laziz Kudratov, the country’s minister of Investment, Industry and Trade, told Euronews that legislation establishing the Tashkent International Financial Centre is expected to be signed soon.
The project would create a separate jurisdiction based on common law principles. Kudratov said the aim is to give foreign financial companies a legal environment based on international standards rather than requiring them to operate solely through local legislation.
He also said the planned jurisdiction would include 50 years of tax incentives, including exemptions from corporate income tax, value-added tax (VAT), property tax and customs duties.
The government is also preparing legislation covering alternative investment structures, including venture capital, private equity and limited partner-general partner investment models.
“We are also coming up with a new law on alternative investments,” Kudratov said. “It will create a framework to protect venture capital, LP and GP investment, and private equity investment in Uzbekistan.”
Dan said the National Investment Fund listing showed that international investors were willing to participate when transactions were structured in the right way.
“The initial public offering of the National Investment Fund shows that, in the right structure, investors are very keen to participate in the capital markets of the country,” he said.
Dan said Uzbekistan’s capital market would need more companies, greater liquidity and more foreign institutional investors in the coming years.
He said continued listings of state-owned enterprises, both within and outside the National Investment Fund’s portfolio, would be important in broadening the investment universe.
Local debt markets are also beginning to attract more attention, he said, with retail investors looking more closely at investment opportunities inside Uzbekistan.
Kudratov said reforms introduced since 2017 had changed the investment environment through tax reforms, currency liberalisation and the removal of restrictions on profit repatriation.
“Any investor can come, invest and get their revenues out of the country within one day,” he said.
For Hoggett, investor confidence also depends on a proven track record.
“You can’t change things overnight and say people need to believe it. They need the evidence to see it,” she said.
The growth of local debt markets and the entry of more retail investors are early signs that Uzbekistan’s financial market is beginning to widen beyond foreign institutional capital, according to Dan.
Hoggett said public markets can play a wider role by opening investment opportunities to more participants.
“The public markets are democratising,” she said.
Hoggett added that private companies are often owned by a relatively small group of investors, while public markets allow a broader range of investors to access company growth. That wider access comes with stronger disclosure requirements for issuers.
For Uzbekistan, broader participation would mean more than attracting foreign capital. It would also involve creating opportunities for domestic investors to participate in the growth of listed companies, debt markets and other financial products.
Governance remains central to the development of Uzbekistan’s capital markets.
Dan said several companies within the National Investment Fund’s portfolio had already introduced board-level changes, including the appointment of independent directors.
“Corporate governance is key,” he said.
He described stronger oversight of state-owned companies as part of improving their operations.
Hoggett said public markets also impose discipline on companies seeking capital.
“The first rule of doing an IPO is meet your estimates, hit what you say you’re going to do,” she said.
That requires companies to build systems, controls, accounting capacity, finance teams and planning processes, she said. Hoggett added that such structures can help companies operate at scale and grow faster.
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The family behind German industrial group Wegmann is preparing to cash in on Europe’s defense spending boom through the planned initial public offering of KNDS, the Franco-German tank manufacturer that could be valued at €15 billion to €18 billion, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.
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One of Europe’s largest military equipment producers, KNDS, rolled out long-awaited details of its initial public offering (IPO), aiming for a dual listing in Paris and Frankfurt in the coming weeks.
The IPO could value KNDS, the maker of Leopard and Leclerc tanks, at between €12bn and €15bn, according to the Financial Times, potentially making it one of Europe’s largest defence listings in recent years.
The listing comes at a time when European military budgets are surging, driven by the war in Ukraine and doubts over the reliability of the US as a security guarantor.
The company declined to comment on the precise date, but CEO Jean-Paul Alary told reporters the offering was expected within weeks.
According to Alary, the move comes as the continent enters what he called a new era of defence and security, with armed forces modernising rapidly and rebuilding the land-warfare capabilities run down during decades of lower spending.
According to Reuters, the firm has now formally launched the IPO process, which is expected to take place in mid-July.
The announcement comes days after Germany unveiled plans to acquire a 40% stake in KNDS, saying the move would secure long-term influence over a company it considers strategically important to European security and defence.
France, which currently owns 50% of KNDS, is expected to reduce its stake to 40%.
The remaining 20% of the company is set to be floated on the stock market, with France and Germany each retaining 40% stakes following the transaction.
According to the Financial Times, the shares are expected to be marketed primarily to institutional investors amid strong demand for European defence stocks.
Once the listing is completed, KNDS shares will begin trading on Euronext Paris and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, giving investors direct exposure to one of Europe’s largest land-defence manufacturers.
KNDS was created in 2015 through the merger of Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and France’s Nexter.
The rapid emergence of the rival adds to the pressure on Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest ammunition maker and KNDS’s main competitor in subsectors such as land systems.
The Düsseldorf-based group, whose shares have shed roughly a quarter of their value this year, had itself reportedly hoped to buy into KNDS, only to be shut out by the governments’ intervention.
To make matters worse, Berlin announced it would scrap Rheinmetall’s multi-billion-euro F126 frigate programme, which would have been Germany’s largest warship order since the Second World War, in favour of smaller vessels from rival builder TKMS.
Rheinmetall, which had been poised to take over the project, fell 13% in early trading on Wednesday due to the news.
The squeeze also coincides with regulatory scrutiny at home.
Germany’s Monopolies Commission has warned that defence procurement is concentrated among a small number of suppliers, potentially weakening competition and driving up costs.
Calling for reforms to procurement rules, commission chairman Tomaso Duso said competition was “the fundamental pillar of Europe’s economic order” and should play a greater role in the defence sector.
A listed KNDS will give investors a direct yardstick against which to measure Rheinmetall’s order momentum and margins.
Additional sources • AFP
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Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate ended its third day of public trading worth roughly $2.65 trillion (€2.28tn), having displaced Amazon in the global market-capitalisation rankings.
The stock settled at $201.8 per share, in a debut week that has rewritten the upper reaches of the world’s equity leaderboard at remarkable speed.
The milestone caps an already extraordinary stretch for the company, which listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX only last Friday.
SpaceX priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, raising around $75 billion (€65bn) in what was the largest initial public offering in history, comfortably eclipsing the $29.4 billion (€25.3bn) that Saudi Aramco raised in 2019.
The company also increased the total capital raised to $85.7 billion (€73.8bn) after underwriters exercised the “greenshoe” option to purchase additional shares on Monday due to exceptional demand.
At Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading more than 50% above its IPO price.
During the trading session, share prices climbed as high as $225.6, briefly pushing SpaceX’s valuation above $3 trillion (€2.58tn) and, for a moment, ahead of Microsoft as the world’s fourth most valuable company.
The stock later pared those gains, closing below that threshold, but the intraday spike underscored the intensity of investor appetite for the listing.
Based on Tuesday’s closing prices, only Nvidia ($5tr), Alphabet ($4.5tr), Apple ($4.4tr) and Microsoft ($2.9tr) had larger market capitalisations than SpaceX. Eight of the world’s ten most valuable listed companies are tied to the technology and AI sector, a concentration that has defined markets throughout 2026.
Tuesday’s advance coincided with a significant strategic move.
Before the opening bell, SpaceX announced an all-stock agreement to acquire Anysphere, the developer behind the AI coding assistant Cursor, in a deal valuing the startup at $60 billion (€51.7bn).
According to a regulatory filing, a SpaceX subsidiary will merge into Anysphere, leaving Cursor as a wholly owned arm of the group, with completion expected in the third quarter, subject to regulatory approval.
The purchase deepens SpaceX’s push into enterprise AI, a market where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have gained early commercial traction, and it follows the company’s merger with Musk’s xAI venture in February.
The acquisition stems from an option SpaceX secured in April, under which it agreed either to acquire Cursor for $60 billion (€51.7bn) later this year or pay $10 billion (€8.6bn) for a more limited partnership to access its computing technology.
However, despite all the positive news, the speed of the climb has drawn caution.
Sceptics argue that SpaceX remains overvalued, given that it has yet to turn a profit and only 3% to 4% of its total equity is publicly traded.
A fast-track route into major stock indices, which compels passive funds to buy the shares, is expected to further amplify demand for the limited supply of shares in the opening days of trading.
This article does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research and invest according to your specific circumstances.
A $60B tech acquisition marks the aggressive start of SpaceX’s post-IPO capital strategy.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — more commonly known as SpaceX — is not letting proceeds from the largest initial public offering in history sit on the launchpad, and piquing the Street’s curiosity on its cash management strategy.
The day after its IPO trades settled, the company, which added approximately $75 billion to its roughly $15.85 billion pre-IPO cash position, announced plans to acquire AI coding company Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal that is expected to close in the third quarter, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX first announced it had secured the right to buy Cursor in April but held off due to its upcoming IPO, Bloomberg News reported.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The rocket-launch, connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and social media company’s IPO placed it in the top 10 U.S.-listed companies by market capitalization, roughly $2.1 trillion. It also placed it fifth among the U.S. companies with the largest cash positions. It trails only behind Berkshire Hathaway Inc. ($397.38 billion), Amazon.com Inc. ($145.97 billion), Alphabet Inc. ($126.84 billion), and Interactive Brokers Group Inc. ($100.39 billion), according to TradingView data.
The company has not detailed whether it plans to use the newfound capital to fund growth, reduce risk, repay debt, or preserve option value. With a $2.1 trillion market cap and near-guarantee to be included in the marquee stock indices, does it truly matter?
“What SpaceX does with cash and its capital structure are rounding errors in its valuation,” Aswath Damodaran, of New York University’s Stern School of Business, told Global Finance.
However, the treasury still has an important part to play, said John Graham, finance professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
“There are examples of companies that grew too fast,” he said. “They were on a positive trajectory with their strategies, but did not manage their cash appropriately and went bankrupt.”
Graham noted that he was not privy to SpaceX’s capital allocation plans, but typically sees two typical uses for IPO proceeds, depending on the company’s maturity.
Startups often use their newfound cash to fuel their drive to profitability while keeping the lights on. Profitable companies tend to use their windfalls to let founders, early investors, and employees cash out a bit.
“Both of those are probably happening in this case, just on a larger scale,” he said.
Investors can view SpaceX as a mixture of mature and startup business lines. The company’s Starlink satellite-based Internet connectivity unit is currently the only unit generating profits on roughly $11.39 billion in revenue, according to its prospectus.
Whether that, combined with its IPO proceeds, is enough to subsidize its AI and other businesses remains to be seen, and raises a broader question about how SpaceX and the ‘Elon Premium’ will test the market’s logic.
“As things stand today, investors are essentially buying a company whose core business is launching satellites, which remains its largest source of revenue,” said Ismael García Puente, Deputy Director of Investment Strategy at Spanish investment manager Mapfre AM. “Its technology and AI-related businesses are still operating at a loss. We need to see how these segments evolve before we can assess their long-term profitability.”
Contact the author: rdaly@gfmag.com
Elon Musk’s rocket company has agreed to buy Cursor, which uses AI to automate the process of writing code.
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In SpaceX’s case, appetite was exceptionally high. The underwriters, which included Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan, exercised the option in full, purchasing an additional 83.3 million shares directly from the company to meet the huge demand.
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OpenAI is facing a fresh regulatory challenge after a group of state attorneys general demanded a wide range of documents about how ChatGPT protects the people who use it, a move that arrives at a delicate moment for the company as it lays the groundwork for a potential public listing.
The investigation, which arrived just days after OpenAI filed confidential paperwork for an IPO, threatens to complicate a listing that some analysts expect will value the ChatGPT maker at roughly $1 trillion (€861bn).
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the matter, OpenAI received the subpoena on Friday from a group of states, with the inquiry led by New York’s attorney general.
Officials are requesting material covering the company’s advertising practices, how it keeps people using its service, its handling of consumer and health data, and its policies towards minors and older adults.
OpenAI said it would engage with the offices behind the request and stressed that protections are already built into its product.
A spokesperson stated that the company takes the concerns raised by the attorneys general “seriously” and works to bring the benefits of the technology to people responsibly. However, the firm has not confirmed which other US states are taking part.
The subpoena adds to a growing list of legal headaches.
Last Thursday, a Canadian woman sued OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for her daughter’s suicide. Earlier in June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against the company and CEO Sam Altman after two shootings in which the alleged attackers reportedly used the chatbot to plan their crimes.
OpenAI responded that its models repeatedly urged the individuals to seek help from mental health professionals and that it cooperated with the police in both cases.
These are not the first courtroom tests of the year for OpenAI.
In May, a federal jury in Oakland, California took less than two hours to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit accusing Altman of abandoning the firm’s nonprofit roots, finding he had filed too late. Musk, who called the ruling a “calendar technicality”, said he would appeal.
The clampdown also extends across the industry.
European regulators have opened investigations into Musk’s rival chatbot Grok over antisemitic and sexualised content, including deepfake images.
Anthropic, also preparing an IPO, was told by the Trump administration to restrict two of its models abroad on national security grounds, illustrating how AI governance has become an increasingly fraught political battleground.
Additional sources • AP
Bulls vs. Bears: SpaceX valuation in focus after record-setting IPO
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June 12 (UPI) — SpaceX began trading Friday at $150 and has gone as high as $176 as SPCX in its initial public offering, the largest one in history.
Elon Musk and SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell Friday. Musk was in Texas and Shotwell was at the Nasdaq in New York City.
After trading opened, the stock topped $160, sending the company to more than a $2 trillion market cap. By early afternoon, the stock was at $176.52.
“I love the incredible people of SpaceX beyond words,” Musk wrote Friday afternoon on X.
The company had traded more than 360 million shares as of 2 p.m. EDT Friday. It has more than 172 million shares on the Nasdaq alone, CNBC reported. Polymarket bettors believe, at 70%, that SpaceX will close at more than $2 trillion Friday. Five other U.S. companies have reached the $2 trillion market cap: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.
Already a trillionaire, Musk is about to be CEO of two of the Top 10 most valuable publicly traded companies at the same time.
Musk said before the IPO that SpaceX had been cash-flow positive since around 2015, CNBC reported. He said he chose to take the company public now to raise capital for “a significant growth phase.” Some plans for that growth include putting more than 100,000 satellites in orbit for communications and building artificial intelligence data centers in space.
“Having a private company was important to us early on because we weren’t really focused on quarterly financials, we were so focused on the long-term outlook for the company,” Shotwell told CNBC in an interview.
Shotwell said interest from investors also helped drive the decision.
“We’ve been feeling, over the last few years, a lot of pressure from everyday Americans and our friends that wanted to buy stock, and there was just no way for these folks to get in,” Shotwell said.
According to its prospectus, SpaceX has had a total loss of $41.3 billion since it was founded in 2002. Originally founded as a maker of reusable rockets, the only profitable part of the business has been the Starlink satellite Internet service.
In February, SpaceX acquired Musk’s startup xAI, which has been embattled this year for its ability to undress people in AI-generated images. Several countries and people have sued the company to force it to not allow the bot to do so against the victims’ will.
Citadel Securities, which helps execute trade orders, processed more retail activity for SpaceX than any other IPO auction on record, CNN reported the company said. Retail investors are regular people trading stocks instead of professionals.
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The moment that Wall Street had anticipated all year arrived on Friday as SpaceX, the AI and aerospace company controlled by Elon Musk, began trading publicly on the Nasdaq in the largest initial public offering (IPO) in the history of financial markets.
In a speech before the New York session opened for trading, Musk stated that SpaceX’s goal is to “take the fiction out of science fiction.”
SPCX opened at $150, over 10% above its $135 IPO price, and it was already at more than $160 after the first few minutes of live trading.
The company confirmed on Thursday that it had priced 555.6 million Class A shares at $135 each, valuing the firm at roughly $1.78 trillion (€1.54trn) and targeting a raise of $75 billion (€64.5bn) that instantly eclipsed Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion (€25.4bn) listing, which had stood as the global record for almost seven years.
Only around 3% to 4% of SpaceX shares are currently available for public trading.
The company earmarked as much as 30% of its offering for retail investors, including 10% dedicated to European buyers, but the final amount was set at 20%. As for options contracts on SPCX, they are scheduled to begin trading next week.
The IPO has also brought Elon Musk closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
Forbes valued his pre-IPO SpaceX stake, estimated at around 42% of the company, at about $500bn (€435bn). At the IPO valuation, those holdings are worth roughly $690bn (€600bn), adding nearly $190bn (€165bn) to his fortune and pushing his net worth closer to the $1tn (€870bn) milestone.
Along with Musk, thousands of SpaceX employees are benefitting from the IPO and becoming millionaires.
The listing will give millions of savers indirect exposure to SpaceX as the company is expected to qualify for major stock market indexes shortly after its debut, meaning its shares could be automatically purchased by index-tracking funds.
SpaceX is estimated to be fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100 in less than a month, as opposed to a typical wait of as much as a year.
Nasdaq’s new fast-entry rule, introduced in May, now sees it evaluating newly listed stocks for potential entry by ranking their market capitalisation on the seventh trading day and assessing whether they would rank within the top 40 index members.
SpaceX is already in the top 10.
Among other changes announced, the rule that requires companies to float a minimum of 10% of their shares was also scrapped.
Analysts estimate that funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 will be required to purchase at least $7bn (€6bn) worth of SpaceX shares around the inclusion date, creating a wave of mechanical demand.
SpaceX has also already become eligible for inclusion in both the Russell US Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series under the newly announced fast-entry rules from the index provider FTSE Russell.
The S&P 500, however, will not adopt a similar fast-track approach.
S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed in early June that it would maintain its 12-month seasoning requirement and GAAP profitability test, meaning SpaceX will not join the index before mid-2027.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
This article does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research and invest according to your specific circumstances.
SpaceX lands on public markets as the sixth largest US company by market value.
Published On 12 Jun 202612 Jun 2026
SpaceX has debuted on US markets with a market valuation of more than $2 trillion, minting CEO Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.
Shares are set to open on Friday at $150 per share, marking a 6.6 percent increase from the initial public offering (IPO) price, valuing the company at $1.96 trillion putting the aerospace company on track to become the sixth-largest company in the United States.
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The company sold $75bn in shares, immediately valuing it at $1.77 trillion. The IPO was oversubscribed four times higher than was otherwise expected, according to the Reuters news agency.
Of the institutional investors allocated, according to Bloomberg News, as much as 70 percent went to what are called long-only investments — a strategy in which holders buy assets based on the expectation that their value will grow over time — and sovereign wealth funds, including those from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen rang the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City opening bell at 9:30am local time as US markets opened.
On Thursday, protesters gathered outside the MarketSite to protest the IPO amid continued allegations that Grok, part of xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, allowed users to create non-consensual deepfake sexualised images before the IPO debut.
Shares of SpaceX did not trade until the middle of the trading day as the exchange collected buy and sell orders and underwriters delayed trading until supply and demand were balanced.
“We would expect SpaceX to see an immediate pop in trading due to the hype around the deal, north of 20 percent perhaps,” said Samuel Kerr, global head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket. “Anything lower would actually make me nervous.”
Exchanges and trading firms are eager to avoid the technical mishaps that marred Meta’s 2012 debut. With SpaceX widely viewed as a dress rehearsal for a new generation of mega-listings, market participants will also be watching for signals on investor appetite in advance of forthcoming IPOs for AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI.
The landmark listing cemented Musk’s status as the first trillionaire ever and propelled SpaceX into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies — even though the firm posted a loss of nearly $5bn last year and generated only a fraction of the revenue brought in by similarly valued tech giants.
The surge comes amid growth driven by its Starlink subsidiary, which drives as much as 80 percent of its revenue.
On Friday, SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket with 29 satellites into space from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
SpaceX is set for the largest stock market debut ever.
Elon Musk’s rocket company begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SPCX. The company priced its shares at $135 each, raising $75 billion (€64.5bn) and valuing the business at $1.75 trillion (€1.5trn) in the biggest stock market flotation on record.
The deal would comfortably eclipse Saudi Aramco’s previous record of $29.4bn, set in 2019 and later increased through an overallotment option.
SpaceX made an unusually strong push to attract retail investors, including those in Europe. According to Bloomberg, individual investors placed roughly $100bn (€86.6bn) in orders through trading platforms including Robinhood, Fidelity and SoFi during the IPO process.
That demand alone exceeded the company’s $75bn (€64.5bn) fundraising target, underscoring the level of interest from smaller investors ahead of the stock market debut.
Yet beneath the hype, several warning lights are flashing. Here are five risks investors should weigh before the SpaceX IPO goes live.
At a valuation of $1.75tn (€1.5trn), investors would be valuing SpaceX at roughly 94 times its annual revenue, which was $18.7bn (€16.1bn) in 2025. By comparison, Nvidia — one of the market’s most highly valued technology companies — trades at less than a quarter of that level.
The investment research firm Morningstar, which values the company at $780bn (€675bn), called it “significantly overvalued” while Goldman Sachs data suggests sustaining the share price would require revenues above $100bn (€86.6bn) by 2030, implying a compound annual growth of more than 40%.
History offers a note of caution. Research by University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, often referred to as “Mr IPO”, found that while IPOs between 2012 and 2021 rose an average of 23.6% on their first day of trading, they returned just 10.6% over the following three years.
SpaceX’s expected inclusion in major stock indexes has become a point of controversy. Investment officials from four large US states have urged Nasdaq and FTSE Russell to explain recent rule changes that could accelerate the company’s entry into widely tracked benchmarks.
Critics argue the move could expose passive investors to a highly valued stock sooner than expected, while the index providers say the changes reflect broader market developments.
The debate matters because relatively few SpaceX shares will initially be available for trading. Although SpaceX is valued at $1.75tr (€1.5trn), only around 3% to 4% of its shares will initially be available for public trading.
That means the company’s market value will be determined by trading in a relatively small portion of its equity. Reports suggest more than 75% of the $75bn (€64.5bn) offering has already been allocated to existing investors and insiders, leaving fewer shares available on the open market.
According to Morningstar, the limited float and strong demand for artificial intelligence-related stocks could help support the share price in the early stages of trading, even if the company is valued above what the research firm considers fair value. The firm argues that a clearer picture of investor demand may emerge once lock-up restrictions expire and more shares become available for trading.
Some analysts, however, believe the limited float could continue to support the stock. Estimates suggest between $22 billion (€19bn) and $27 billion (€23.4bn) of passive investment could flow into SpaceX once it joins the Nasdaq 100, creating additional demand from index-tracking funds.
SpaceX’s financial results may also give investors pause.
The prospectus shows that the company is growing rapidly but still losing money.
The company owns the Starlink satellite internet service, which generates most of its revenue and is its only profitable business. It also owns the artificial intelligence company xAI, which merged with SpaceX in February.
According to the filing, SpaceX carried an accumulated deficit of $41.3bn (€35.76bn) as of 31 March and reported a net loss of $4.27bn (€3.7bn) in the first quarter of 2026.
This compares with $528mn (€457mn) in the same period a year earlier.
Much of the recent loss stems from xAI. According to SpaceX’s IPO filing, the AI business recorded an operating loss of about $6.4 billion (€5.5bn) in 2025. The filing also showed xAI spent heavily in the opening months of 2026 as it expanded its AI infrastructure.
Morningstar argues the AI unit “poses a material threat of value destruction”, noting that Grok has yet to win meaningful market share against rival chatbots.
Supporters counter that the losses are a choice, not a structural flaw.
Revenue climbed 33% to $18.7bn (€16.2bn) in 2025, up from $14.1 billion (€12.2bn) a year earlier. The underlying launch and satellite business was profitable as recently as 2024. The deficits largely reflect heavy investment in AI infrastructure, spending that supporters say is already beginning to be offset by new compute contracts.
Supporters argue investors are paying for future growth rather than current profits.
Starlink remains the company’s main source of revenue, while its artificial intelligence business is expected to play a larger role in the years ahead.
Bulls also point to SpaceX’s dominant position in rocket launches and satellite communications, arguing the company is uniquely placed to benefit from growing demand for connectivity, computing power and AI infrastructure.
SpaceX conducts more rocket launches annually than the rest of the world combined and counts over nine million Starlink subscribers, but its newest growth driver is the AI data-centre business acquired through the xAI merger.
Last Friday, Google agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million (€796.6mn) per month for compute capacity at xAI data centres, in a 32-month deal running from October 2026 through June 2029, and covering access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs.
That followed a May agreement under which Anthropic pays $1.25 billion (€1.08bn) a month to rent the entire output of the Colossus 1 data centre until May 2029, putting combined annualised compute revenue at around $26 billion (€22.5bn).
Bulls argue this contracted income, won in under four months, shows how quickly the company can monetise its infrastructure. Sceptics note that both contracts carry 90-day termination clauses after December 2026, and that Google itself has framed the arrangement as “bridge capacity” rather than a permanent commitment.
SpaceX’s success is closely tied to Elon Musk, whose profile and track record have helped attract investors, customers and business partners. That creates what investors call “key-person risk” — concerns about how the company would fare if he were no longer leading it.
The company’s governance structure reinforces that dependence. Musk’s super-voting Class B shares give him around 85% of voting power, leaving outside shareholders with little influence over major corporate decisions. In practice, that means no one but Musk himself can determine whether he remains chief executive.
Critics also point to SpaceX’s incorporation in Texas, where only investors holding at least 3% of shares can bring derivative lawsuits. The Danish academic pension fund AkademikerPension has blacklisted the stock, describing the governance structure as “catastrophic”.
Supporters argue that dual-class share structures are common among US technology firms, including Meta and Alphabet. They say concentrated voting control allows founders to pursue long-term goals without pressure from short-term investors.
Musk’s prominence also brings political risk. US Senator Elizabeth Warren has urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to scrutinise the listing, warning that future index inclusion could expose millions of passive investors to the stock without them actively choosing it.
Others note that the SEC completed its review faster than expected, allowing the IPO process to move ahead without delay and suggesting regulators see no immediate obstacle to the listing.
Disclaimer: This information does not constitute financial advice, always do your own research on top to ensure it’s right for your specific circumstances. Also remember, we are a journalistic website and aim to provide the best guides, tips and advice from experts. If you rely on the information here, then you do so entirely at your own risk.
SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO is hours away from reshaping the fortunes of thousands of employees.
The listing, set for this Friday, is expected to mint millionaires not only among senior engineers and executives, but also among blue-collar workers, including cooks and welders, who received equity as part of their compensation packages.
The windfall is heavily concentrated around Brownsville, Texas, one of the poorest cities in the US, where SpaceX employs more than 3,000 people at its Starbase facility.
What makes this IPO unusual, even by Silicon Valley standards, is how far down the organisational chart the equity grants appear to have reached.
Some estimates cited by media reports put the total number of newly minted millionaires across the entire company at around 4,000. However, the figures could not be independently verified.
Michael Limas, a financial planner based in Brownsville, told Bloomberg that several of the company’s non-technical workers received stock options as part of their pay.
“SpaceX has been very friendly with options at various levels, from top to bottom. It’s something that’s unique to this area,” Limas stated.
One example cited by the investment research platform Moby illustrates the scale rather starkly. A welder’s initial equity grant of $10,000 (€8,650) is now reportedly valued at close to $880,000 (€762,000) ahead of the listing.
These individual figures reflect a broader picture of generous equity compensation that has been reported consistently across multiple outlets.
The IPO itself features a staggered lockup structure rather than the standard 180-day cliff that most companies employ.
According to the prospectus, it includes multiple early release windows, among them a performance-linked mechanism that would activate if the stock trades 30% above its IPO price on five out of ten consecutive trading days. That would allow some employees to access their new wealth within weeks of the debut.
SpaceX’s impact on the region has already been striking, and the financial gains generated by the IPO are likely to amplify it.
Brownsville has long ranked among the most economically deprived cities in the US, with a median family income roughly a third below the national average, according to government data.
SpaceX arrived about a decade ago, establishing its Starbase launch facility on the Gulf of Mexico shore around 40 kilometres from the city centre.
The transformation since then has reportedly been marked by an influx of professionals from California and elsewhere. Rising housing costs have followed, as they often do when wealth becomes concentrated in a particular area.
According to several realtors and economists, the median housing prices in the broader Brownsville-Harlingen metro area have risen roughly 25% since 2020, from around $185,000 (€160,000) to $233,000 (€201,000).
Long-time residents, many of them on modest incomes, are feeling the pressure.
For many employees, the transition from holding shares they could not easily sell to having access to cash brings its own complications.
According to Bloomberg, wealth managers in the region describe a climate of considerable anxiety among staff, given the sense that this may be their single opportunity to build generational wealth and that getting the timing and tax planning wrong could be costly.
More than 100 SpaceX employees in the region reportedly pooled together to negotiate wealth-management terms collectively with the advisory firm Choreo, a move that helped them secure lower management fees by bringing between $1 billion (€865mn) and $5 billion (€4.33bn) in potential assets to the table.
Brownsville’s mayor, John Cowen, a sixth-generation resident of the area, has sought to frame the transformation in positive terms, arguing to US media that it is great for the city to be known as a place for investment.
Beyond SpaceX itself, other industrial projects have followed in the company’s wake, including building a liquefied natural gas export terminal near the Port of Brownsville.
Back in March, US President Donald Trump also announced the construction of a $300 billion (€260bn) oil refinery at the port, which could reportedly bring 500 full-time jobs.
Whether the IPO ultimately delivers on its promise, and how equitably its benefits filter through a city that has known far more hardship than prosperity, remains to be seen.
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is targeting a valuation of nearly $1.77 trillion in its blockbuster initial public offering (IPO), paving the way for the largest stock market debut in history.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, SpaceX said that it plans to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising approximately $75bn.
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The eye-popping valuation would make SpaceX the world’s seventh-largest company by market capitalisation, ahead of Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla and social media giant Meta, and just behind Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC.
It would also eclipse energy giant Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut, which raised $26bn at a valuation of $1.7 trillion.
Musk, who holds a roughly 42 percent stake in SpaceX, is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire upon the company’s debut on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange on June 12.
Despite the public listing, Musk will retain effective control of SpaceX with more than 82 percent of voting rights, the result of a dual-class stock structure that grants certain shares 10 votes instead of one.
The Texas-based firm’s decision to set a specific share price ahead of its IPO marks a break from usual practice.
Companies preparing for a public listing usually announce a preliminary price range that can be adjusted based on investor interest.
“The genuine surprise is that SpaceX fixed a price before the investor roadshow began,” Fabien Yip, a market analyst at online trading and investment company IG Group, told Al Jazeera.
“To me, this reflects Musk’s control over the deal terms and his confidence that the book will fill.”
Founded by Musk in 2002, SpaceX is best known for designing and launching rockets, spacecraft and reusable launch vehicles on behalf of NASA and private companies.
The company also provides internet services and artificial intelligence models through its Starlink and xAI divisions.
Musk has outlined lofty ambitions for SpaceX, including to establish a “self-sustaining” city on Mars, “make life multiplanetary,” and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”.
SpaceX’s listing will be a test of investors’ confidence in Musk’s vision, which has yet to translate into profits at the company.
SpaceX reported a net loss of $4.9bn on revenue of 18.7bn in 2025, followed by a $4.3bn loss in the first quarter of this year.
Jay R Ritter, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida who specialises in IPOs, said the SpaceX IPO differs from Saudi Aramco’s blockbuster listing as the state-owned oil company had a track record of generating large revenues and profits.
“SpaceX, in contrast, has trailing annual revenue of less than $20bn, and is not profitable,” Ritter told Al Jazeera.
“So, one company’s valuation was – and is – based on its demonstrated profitability, while the other company’s valuation is based on potential.”
“With SpaceX, there is a risk that cash flows will be used to send hundreds of thousands of people to Mars, at a loss,” Ritter added.
Despite SpaceX’s lack of profitability, market sentiment is strong, said IG’s Yip, noting that buyers of investment products linked to the listing are pricing the company’s end-of-first-day market capitalisation at $2.2 trillion.
“The Tesla parallel is perhaps worth drawing: It debuted in 2010 as a loss-making company and largely tracked the S&P 500 for years, only breaking away decisively once it turned profitable for the first time in Q1 2013,” Yip said, referring to the benchmark stock index on Wall Street.
“SpaceX investors are making a similar bet on future growth, with the added complexity that SpaceX’s addressable market – rockets, satellite internet, AI – is considerably broader than Tesla’s was at listing.”
A $50 billion refinery valuation tests liquidity across African capital markets.
Dangote Refinery’s initial public offering is shaping up to be one of the most historic capital markets events for the continent—a referendum on whether Africa can mobilize the liquidity and investor confidence required to finance a globally competitive industry.
Chinenyem Anyanwu, CEO of Lagos-based Dependable Securities, said the offering is attracting both institutional investors and first-time investors, including Nigerians in the diaspora.
“The expectation is very high among the investing public,” Anyanwu tells Global Finance. “Some are Nigerians outside the country, while others are foreign investors looking for exposure to a strategic African industrial asset.” Aliko Dangote, chairman of the Dangote Group, disclosed that requests for private placement had surpassed $2 billion.
Speaking during a visit by executives from First HoldCo, the parent company of First Bank of Nigeria, Dangote said the company would be unable to meet all requests. He added that the response demonstrates investors’ confidence in the project.
Interest has also come from prominent Nigerian investors. Femi Otedola, chairman of First HoldCo, has said he plans to invest $100 million in a private placement ahead of the IPO, with proceeds from the sale of his stake in Geregu Power.
Although early market estimates put the refinery at about $50 billion, Dangote has said advisers are still determining the final valuation. Despite plans to offer only 10% of the equity to the public, the IPO would still be unprecedented for African exchanges.
“Ten percent of the refinery is still a substantial offering,” Anyanwu said. “It is larger than the market capitalization of many companies currently listed on the Nigerian Exchange, so demand is unlikely to be a problem.”
The refinery, which began operations in 2024, has already begun reshaping Nigeria’s energy trade by reducing reliance on imported fuel and positioning the country as an exporter of refined petroleum products. Built at an estimated cost of $20 billion, the 650,000-barrels-per-day facility in Lagos, where Dangote Group is headquartered, is expected to expand capacity in the coming years.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
As SpaceX and Anthropic eye public listings, index providers brace for major market dislocations.
When mega-cap companies go public, index providers and investors will see it as dropping battleships into the old fishing pond. The resulting waves are going to soak everyone.
Privately held artificial intelligence (AI) vendor Anthropic announced its filing of a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an initial public offering at a later date. According to the company’s website, Anthropic has not decided on the number of shares it will offer, nor at what price. The company recently closed a $65 billion fundraising round, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.
The news comes as the SEC published SpaceX’s revised Form S-1 on the market regulator’s EDGAR database. The conspicuously absent OpenAI reportedly is filling out its underwriters bench for a possible September IPO. The AI company reached a post-money valuation of $852 billion, according to CNBC.
If index providers add these firms that would instantly become one of the 10-largest listed companies by market cap before their trading prices stabilize, it could cost them dearly due to resulting massive price dislocations.
“Leaving out a mega-cap company means the index is not doing its job,” James Angel, associate professor and faculty affiliate at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, tells Global Finance. “It thus makes sense to include a big IPO fairly quickly.”
“Big IPO” is not an understatement. Wall Street consensus expects SpaceX’s IPO to result in a market capitalization between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, would lower Meta’s and Tesla’s rankings in the10-largest Nasdaq-100 Index components by market capitalization while move Micron Technology out of the Top 10. If rumors of a SpaceX-Teslamerger prove true, only Nvidia, Alphabet, and Apple would have a larger market capitalization than the resulting $3.4 trillion behemoth.
Nasdaq has already addressed the mega-cap issue by updating the methodology for inclusion in its Nasdaq-100 Index, which represents the 100 largest Nasdaq-listed non-financial companies, in May.
Among the major changes made by Nasdaq was introducing quarterly index reconstitutions in March, June, and September, in addition to its regular December reconstitution. Nasdaq has also incorporated a “Fast Entry” pathway for new listings that rank among the top 40 of the current Nasdaq-100 constituents by full market capitalization, based on both listed and unlisted shares.
“These companies are evaluated on their seventh trading day and, if eligible, added shortly thereafter, with all existing liquidity requirements still applying,” explained Emily Spurling, Global Head of Index at Nasdaq Global Indexes, in an interview posted on the Nasdaq website. “The quarterly rebalance handles the broader population of eligible companies; Fast Entry ensures the index can respond in a timely way when a company of significant scale enters the public market.”
SpaceX stock could see its highest price jump not on June 12, its reported IPO day, but on July 7, the earliest it could be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index, according to The Motley Fool’s Sean Williams.
“Taking into account the Juneteenth (June 19) and Independence Day (July 3) holidays for the stock market, the 15th trading day, including its IPO day, is July 6,” he wrote. “Index funds that attempt to mirror the market-cap-weighted Nasdaq-100 will be required to purchase a jaw-dropping number of shares after this 15-day period comes to a close. Mandatory purchases from exchange-traded funds and index funds are estimated at $22 billion to $27 billion.”
“Nasdaq made the biggest change in the Nasdaq-100 rules as an inducement to listing on Nasdaq,” says Angel. “The other index providers have no similar incentive to shorten the seasoning period. I get the impression they are just doing it to make their indices more reflective of what is going on in the market.”
Meanwhile, S&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) is mulling methodology changes to its S&P U.S. Indices and Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Indices. The company is considering whether to implement a “narrowly defined rule exception for MegaCap companies and adjustment to the IPO seasoning period,” according to a prepared statement.
The index vendor defines mega-cap companies as those with a market capitalization equal to or greater than the 100th largest company in the S&P Total Market Index, which was approximately $150 billion at the start of June.
According to reports from Bloomberg News, the major consideration is whether to reduce the seasoning period for IPOs before they are eligible for inclusion in an index to six months from 12 months
The consultation period ended on May 28, and any changes that S&P DJI proposes to implement would take effect “prior to the market open on Monday, June 8, 2026, unless otherwise announced,” the statement continued.
The company declined to comment beyond its published statement.
Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering.
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Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, teeing up what could become a watershed moment for Wall Street’s AI frenzy.
The move, announced on Monday, sets up a high-stakes test of whether investor appetite for the AI revolution that has reshaped white-collar work around the world can match the sky-high expectations surrounding the booming sector.
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Anthropic, which operates AI chatbot Claude, did not disclose the size or the terms of the offering. Confidential submissions let companies advance IPO preparations while shielding sensitive financial details from rivals and the public.
Anthropic last raised $65bn at a post-money valuation of $965bn in late May, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI. The company said at the time it was making annualised revenue of $47bn from selling its technology to people and organisations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.
The crucial step towards a listing comes on the heels of SpaceX’s mega-IPO, which is on course to rewrite the record books as the Elon Musk-led company pursues a $75bn offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation.
Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders, and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fuelling concerns of an AI bubble.
OpenAI and Anthropic have become the face of the AI boom that has redrawn corporate strategies, sparked a global arms race for computing power and talent, and turned AI-linked companies into some of the market’s most richly valued firms.
Anthropic’s rapid rise in early 2026 rattled markets, triggering sharp sell-offs in software and IT stocks as investors worried its increasingly autonomous AI tools could upend traditional business models and accelerate disruption across industries.
“OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to go public before capital runs out,” said analyst Gil Luria from the investment firm DA Davidson.
“The other reason for Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favourable to their financial model.”
OpenAI is also preparing to confidentially file for a US IPO in the coming weeks, adding to a wave of blockbuster listings anticipated in the year ahead.
As many blockbuster listings race towards public markets, companies from SpaceX to AI giants are competing for a finite pool of investor capital.
“The combined demand for capital from SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will be so considerable that it is likely to create disruptions in the capital markets, so going early will be a great advantage,” Luria said.
The listing would represent one of the most consequential stock market debuts in years, potentially reshaping benchmark indexes, investor flows and the broader narrative driving US equities.
At close to a $1 trillion valuation, Anthropic would vault into the top tier of the S&P 500, alongside a handful of elite companies that dominate global equity markets.
An Anthropic debut would be a major boost for the long-sluggish IPO market, though experts and bankers warn an offering of such scale could drain liquidity and investor attention from smaller listings.
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Oura, the Finnish company that created the ring-shaped health tracker worn by millions worldwide, has confidentially submitted draft paperwork to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO, according to several reports.
While the number of shares and the expected price range remain undisclosed, the company had a recent funding round in the fall of 2025 that valued the business at around $11 billion (€9.5bn), more than double the $5 billion (€4.3bn) valuation it earned in a previous round in 2024.
According to CEO Tom Hale, more than 5.5 million Oura rings had been sold up to the end of last year’s third quarter.
At the time, Hale also projected that the company would reach $2 billion (€1.7bn) in annual revenue in 2026 compared with $500 million (€430mn) just two years ago.
The move towards an IPO puts a European wearable brand on Wall Street’s radar at a time when investor appetite for consumer health technology appears to be returning.
Oura has become a standout name in the fast-growing smart ring category, competing against smartwatch giants such as Apple, Garmin and Samsung, while carving out a niche with a distinct piece of hardware that some consumers find less obtrusive.
Over the past two years, the company has expanded aggressively into software, subscriptions and AI-powered health analysis. Its wearable platform now focuses on long-term health signals including sleep, readiness, heart rate, stress and recovery.
More recently, Oura has pushed further into women’s health and AI-based personal coaching, including tools designed to interpret physiological data and provide tailored wellness recommendations.
Analysts see that transition from device maker to subscripton-based health platform as central to its IPO pitch as the firm is currently on pace to surpass 5 million paid members.
The IPO filing marks a significant moment for one of Europe’s most prominent health tech success stories.
Founded in Finland and developed around research into sleep, recovery and biometric monitoring, Oura has grown from a Nordic hardware start-up into a global player in the wearable market.
However, for Europe’s start-up ecosystem, Oura’s planned listing carries broader significance.
While its roots and design philosophy are deeply tied to Finland, the company recently transitioned to a US-based parent company, named Oura Inc. and headquartered in San Francisco, to access American venture capital while keeping its European operations.
Its decision to prepare for a US listing rather than a European one reflects a wider pattern among high-growth European tech firms seeking deeper capital markets and greater visibility among global investors.
The planned flotation arrives during renewed debate over whether Europe is losing some of its most successful technology companies to US exchanges.
Oura joins a growing list of European-founded businesses choosing Wall Street as their route to public markets, drawn by scale, liquidity and stronger investor familiarity with consumer technology.
The company’s IPO will also be seen as a test of investor sentiment towards wearable technology after a mixed few years for the sector.
Unlike smartwatches, smart rings remain a relatively young category, though interest has accelerated rapidly.
Oura is widely viewed as the segment’s category leader and its public debut could offer a clearer benchmark for how markets value next-generation health hardware combined with software subscriptions and AI services.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced plans on Wednesday for one of the biggest stock sales ever, by taking a space company public that is currently losing billions of dollars a year.
A filing shows that SpaceX lost $2.6 billion (€2.24bn) from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses continued at the start of this year.
The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have estimated it at around $75bn (€64.5bn). An offering of that size would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26bn (€22.4bn).
SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said the money will help finance projects to put people on the Moon and Mars, as part of its goal to make humans an interplanetary species in the face of existential threats that could wipe out civilisation.
“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the filing states.
The prospectus reads, in part, like a Hollywood-style vision of the future, detailing in one section that part of Musk’s compensation will be granted only if he maintains “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Short of that, the stock sale alone could make Musk — the founder and a major shareholder of SpaceX — the world’s first trillionaire. Forbes currently estimates his net worth at $839bn (€722bn), roughly equivalent to Poland’s annual GDP.
In addition to making reusable rockets to send astronauts into orbit, SpaceX has other businesses, some successful and others struggling, with plenty of question marks.
The document shows that Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company, is a major source of cash, generating $4.4bn (€3.8bn) in operating income last year. The business uses 10,000 satellites in low orbit to provide internet service to 10 million people in 150 countries and territories.
Among the struggling businesses are two Musk ventures recently acquired by SpaceX — his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and his artificial intelligence firm xAI. Those purchases were criticised by some SpaceX investors as bailouts, as both are significant loss-makers.
The prospectus said its AI business lost $6.4bn (€5.5bn) from operations last year.
The original SpaceX business — building rockets and conducting launches — has benefited from major government contracts, raising questions that could come back to affect the company. Given Musk’s close ties to the Trump administration, government ethics lawyers and watchdogs have questioned whether he received preferential treatment in securing taxpayer-funded contracts, and whether that support will continue once Donald Trump leaves office.
SpaceX has won contracts worth $6bn (€5.2bn) from NASA, the Defence Department and other government agencies over the past five years, according to USAspending.gov. The company noted in its filing that one-fifth of its revenue last year came from the federal government.
Musk was the biggest donor to Trump’s presidential campaign and remains a major backer, despite a sometimes rocky relationship following his role in the government cost-cutting effort known as DOGE early last year.
Like many corporate CEOs, Musk’s compensation goes far beyond his annual salary, which was $54,080 (€46,538.5)in 2025 and has remained unchanged since 2019, according to the filing.
The prospectus says stock grants for him will be divided into 15 nearly equal tranches — 67 million shares each — and will vest only as the company reaches preset market capitalisation targets. In addition to the Mars colony milestone, SpaceX’s market value would need to reach $7.5 trillion (€6.45tr) for him to receive the full award.
He would receive additional stock awards if SpaceX succeeds in deploying giant data centres the size of football fields in space.
The document shows Musk will retain significant control over the business.
It states that he and certain other shareholders will receive shares in a special class of stock that gives them 10 votes per share. These shareholders will be able, among other things, to elect a majority of the company’s board of directors.
“This will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters and the election of our directors,” SpaceX said in a warning to prospective investors.
SpaceX will be able to market the offering to investors — in what is known on Wall Street as a “roadshow” — 15 days after making its prospectus public. In this case, that would be 4 June.
Uzbekistan’s National Investment Fund, known as UzNIF, began trading on the London Stock Exchange on Monday, marking the country’s first international equity offering.
The fund, which is managed by Franklin Templeton, also launched simultaneously on the Tashkent Stock Exchange through a dual listing structure, bringing Uzbek state-linked assets to international equity markets for the first time.
The opening ceremony at the London Stock Exchange brought together executives, investors and Uzbek officials, with speakers presenting the listing as a significant step in the country’s efforts to expand access to international capital markets.
Speaking during the ceremony, Julia Hoggett, Chief Executive Officer of the London Stock Exchange, described the IPO as “the first ever international IPO out of Uzbekistan” and said the transaction could help “more global investment to flow” into the country’s economy.
Hoggett also said the dual listing marked “a new chapter both in London and in Tashkent”, adding that the offering connected international investors with a portfolio of Uzbek companies through a single fund managed by an international asset manager.
Saida Mirziyoyeva, Head of the Administration of the President of Uzbekistan, said Uzbekistan was preparing “new listings” and expanding private sector participation, while also working on plans linked to the proposed Tashkent International Financial Centre.
Speaking from the London Stock Exchange balcony, Mirziyoyeva said the IPO was “not just about raising capital” but also about “building trust in a new generation of Uzbek institutions”.
Jenny Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer of Franklin Templeton, described the IPO as “a defining and historic milestone” for both Uzbekistan and Franklin Templeton, saying the transaction had generated more than $2.8 billion in investor demand globally.
Johnson said orders exceeded the initial offering by more than four times during the bookbuilding process, which ran from late April to mid-May. She added that the domestic offering in Tashkent had become the country’s “largest local listing to date”, allowing local investors to participate alongside international institutional funds.
Thirty percent of the fund’s shares were offered internationally through global depositary receipts, while part of the allocation was also made available to domestic investors through the Tashkent Stock Exchange.
According to previously released information from the fund and its advisers, international demand reached around $2.9 billion (€2.6bn), with more than 160 institutional investors participating in the offering. Among them were BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Redwheel.
The IPO raised approximately $603.6 million (€540m), valuing the fund at around $1.95 billion (€1.74bn) at the offer price. The shares were sold by Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, meaning the proceeds from the transaction will go to the state rather than directly to the fund itself.
The international tranche included more than 23 million global depositary receipts, or GDRs, listed in London under the trading symbols UZNF and UZ20. One GDR represents 64,700 shares in the fund.
Cornerstone investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Franklin Resources and Redwheel, as well as treasury companies linked to the Allan & Gill Gray Foundation, committed a combined $300 million (€268m) to the offering.
UzNIF was established in 2024 under a presidential decree and is managed by Franklin Templeton, the US-based investment company that oversees more than $1.4 trillion (€1.25 trn) in assets globally and operates in more than 150 countries.
The fund’s portfolio includes stakes in 13 state-linked companies operating in sectors considered strategic for the Uzbek economy, including electricity distribution, thermal power generation, hydropower, telecommunications, aviation, rail infrastructure, utilities and banking.
Among the companies included in the portfolio are Uzbektelecom, Uzbekistan Airways, Uzbekhydroenergo and several state energy and infrastructure operators.
The listing also reflects broader efforts to develop domestic capital markets in Uzbekistan and increase participation from local investors alongside international institutions.
Chinese AI firms dominate Hong Kong IPOs with $22 billion in exits, while US tech listings lag amid investor skepticism.
China’s artificial intelligence companies are driving a sharp divergence in global IPO markets, dominating first-quarter listings in Hong Kong and outpacing U.S. tech peers as investor sentiment fractures across regions.
Consider the trend: Chinese AI firms listed in Hong Kong accounted for four of the largest public listings in the first quarter. According to new data from PitchBook, these companies — Z.ai, MiniMax, Biren Technology and Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor — collectively helped drive more than $22 billion in AI-related exit value during the quarter.
Adding Edge Medical, a surgical robotics company, brings the total for all five Chinese listings to over $24 billion.
The performance stands in sharp contrast to the muted reception many U.S. technology IPOs have faced. Investors have grown increasingly skeptical of richly valued software companies amid concerns that AI could disrupt traditional software business models.
“It’s genuinely a confluence of factors rather than any single driver,” Harrison Rolfes, senior research analyst at PitchBook, told Global Finance. “The DeepSeek moment in early 2025 fundamentally shifted investor perception of Chinese AI capability, and that rerating carried momentum into these listings.”
Rolfes said geopolitical considerations also played a major role, creating what he described as a “national champion premium” among investors in Hong Kong and broader Asian markets.
“Structurally, these companies came to market at more digestible valuations relative to their growth profiles compared to U.S. tech IPOs, which have repeatedly disappointed at high entry multiples,” he said.
Investor enthusiasm surrounding Chinese AI firms has emerged as U.S. IPO performance deteriorates.
According to PitchBook data, the median U.S. IPO has underperformed its benchmark by 42 percentage points within 120 days of listing over the trailing 12 months.
“That’s historically the worst stretch in our dataset,” Rolfes said.
PitchBook noted that 2025 already represented a record low, with median IPOs trailing benchmarks by 35.6 percentage points after 120 days. Early 2026 listings are performing even worse, according to the report.
The closest comparison, Rolfes said, was the post-boom correction in 2021, when median U.S. IPOs lagged their benchmarks by 32 percentage points following aggressive pricing during the .
Globally, the median venture capital-backed IPO has underperformed the Morningstar U.S. Market Broad Growth Extended Index—a broad U.S. equity benchmark—by nearly seven percentage points over the past year. In the U.S., the index as a growth-stock yardstick shows that the gap widens sharply to 42 percentage points within 120 days of listing.
Roughly 66% of companies that have gone public since the start of 2025 are currently trading below their IPO prices, PitchBook found.
“The deterioration is progressive, suggesting that initial pricing optimism is giving way to fundamental reassessment as lockup expirations approach and more information reaches the market,” according to the May 5 report.
The divergence in performance has been particularly stark among high-profile tech listings.
CoreWeave, based in Livingston, New Jersey, saw its shares nearly triple since its debut as investor demand for AI computing infrastructure accelerated. But many other venture-backed listings have struggled—badly.
Among the U.S.-listed laggards are shares of eToro, down 45.2%; Netskope, down 61%; Klarna, down 67.1%; Figma, down 85.7%; and Gemini Space Station, down 86.3%.
PitchBook said broader public SaaS markets have also weakened as investors increasingly treat AI as a threat to incumbent software firms rather than a growth catalyst.
“Public markets appear to be treating AI not as a tailwind for existing software but as a displacement risk, which many are calling a ‘SaaSpocalypse,’ in which incumbents are repriced downward even as private AI unicorns command record valuations,” according to the report.
For investors, the divergence raises questions about whether U.S.-listed AI companies still offer the best risk-adjusted exposure to the global AI boom.
“The companies leading Hong Kong’s surge — semiconductor designers, applied AI platforms and robotics-adjacent businesses — are generating real revenue with defensible vertical positioning, and they have outperformed their U.S. counterparts by a wide margin,” Rolfes said.
Expect investors to take a closer look at how heavily their portfolios are tilted toward specific geographies, considering AI-related valuation premiums are persisting longer in Hong Kong than in New York.
Rolfes also cautioned that some of the highest-valued Chinese AI names could eventually face corrections. Still, the underlying businesses are stronger than many Western investors have assumed, he argued.
“The broader takeaway,” he said, “is that Chinese AI has likely graduated from a risk to monitor to a market to understand.”