When SpaceX debuted on public markets in June 2026 at a $2.1 trillion valuation, the largest IPO in history, it was not just a space company listing its shares.
It was a signal that the AI era has entered a new phase, one where the biggest technology bets are no longer being settled in private boardrooms but in open markets, with ordinary investors invited to buy in.
OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly filed confidentially for public offerings, starting a race among major AI companies. Investors are now using a new acronym, MANGOS, to refer to Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX, replacing the older FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) group.
The old grouping was about who owned the most users and the most attention. The new one is about who owns the chips, the models, and the infrastructure that AI runs on.
Apple, Amazon, and Netflix have dropped out of the conversation, replaced by companies betting on compute and intelligence rather than apps and subscriptions. That swap alone tells you where investors think the next decade of value will be made.
The question is whether that rush to go public makes sense, and what it actually means for the person on the other side of the screen using these tools.
Why Now, and Why Public?
The simple answer is that AI is extraordinarily expensive to build. SpaceX raised $75 billion from its IPO and plans to spend a significant portion expanding AI data centers, while OpenAI does not expect to turn a profit until at least 2030.
These are not companies sneaking onto the stock market after years of quiet profitability; they need capital at a scale that private funding rounds can no longer sustain.
Whereas venture capital has limits, public markets do not, or at least they scale in ways private markets cannot match. Going public also gives investors a path to liquidity, which matters enormously for recruiting the kind of talent these companies depend on.
There is also the competitive dimension, especially between OpenAI and Anthropic; the race to go public is partly about securing capital before the rival does, because investor appetite is finite, and first-mover advantage in a hot market is real.
Average IPO valuations in 2026 are running at three times the previous year’s figures and nearly ten times what they were in 2022. The window is open, and these companies are cashing in quick.
Why Making Money Is Harder Than It Looks
Here is where the comparison to social media becomes instructive and sobering. When Facebook listed in 2012, it was already generating billions in advertising revenue.
It had a proven business model, a massive user base, and a clear path to profit. The same was broadly true of Twitter, Snapchat, and the wave of consumer internet companies that went public through the 2010s.
AI companies are in a structurally different position. The technology they are building requires continuous, enormous investment in computing infrastructure. Training a frontier model costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
Running it at scale is also expensive, because every query carries a cost. Social media platforms, once built, were essentially free to operate at scale.
The marginal cost of one more person scrolling a feed is near zero, but the same cost of running a complex prompt through a large language model is not.
There is also the monetization challenge. Social media had advertising baked into its DNA from early on. AI companies are still figuring out the right business model.
Subscriptions, API pricing, and enterprise deals exist, but none of these have yet produced the kind of consistent, high-margin revenue streams that sustain trillion-dollar valuations without significant question marks.
SpaceX lost $4.9 billion in 2025 on $18.6 billion in revenue, with cumulative losses of $41.3 billion since founding. The bet investors are making is not on what these companies earn today. It is on total addressable markets that SpaceX alone estimates at $28.5 trillion, with $26.5 trillion attributed to AI.
READ: Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire
That is an enormous speculative position, and ordinary investors buying in are joining that bet.
What This Means for the Average User
For users, the short-term picture is complicated, because public market pressure has a way of reshaping a company’s priorities in ways that don’t always serve the people using its products.
Once a company answers to quarterly earnings calls and shareholder expectations rather than just to private investors with longer time horizons, the incentive to monetize more aggressively tends to grow, and that pressure tends to show up in familiar ways.
Free tiers get tighter, pricing creeps upward, and features that were once available broadly get pushed behind paywalls as the business looks for ways to demonstrate revenue growth each quarter.
The ethical commitments that AI companies have made around safety, privacy, and responsible deployment will likely face harder scrutiny too, since those commitments often cost money, and money becomes a more contested resource once margins are being watched by shareholders rather than just founders.
That said, the capital flowing in from public markets could just as easily accelerate real improvements, funding better models, faster response times, broader access, and more reliable infrastructure than these companies could otherwise afford to build.
READ: OpenAI Files for IPO, Joining Anthropic in Race to Go Public
If the money raised actually allows AI companies to reach sustainable profitability without hollowing out their core products in the process, users stand to benefit from a more stable and better-resourced ecosystem than the one that exists today.
For now, the AI gold rush has gone public. Whether ordinary investors and ordinary users come out ahead depends on what these companies build with the money they raise and how quickly they can turn extraordinary ambition into earnings.
