SpaceX finally put a real number on the table — now we get to compare it with everything the roadshow promised. If you're just joining us: SpaceX came public at 135, opened at 150, then ran north of 200 before falling more than fifty percent from its June peak. After that whipsaw, one question was hanging over the stock. Could Starlink's growth and the newer AI ambitions actually carry the valuation? Today's first post-IPO earnings report is the test. This is AI IPO Watch. The SpaceX print lands today. Google's building a two-hundred-billion-dollar finance machine for Anthropic, while a new warning says mega-deals like these are quietly draining the market. And the lock-up clock starts tomorrow. Let's open the document. The Star, with Akash Sriram, Joey Roulette and Sayantani Ghosh:
SpaceX's revenue nearly doubled, the rocket company said in its first earnings report since going public, fueled by its booming Starlink satellite communications and AI businesses, but executives flagged the spending spree underpinning its lofty ambitions is far from over.
That SpaceX repricing story we left hanging on earnings risk? It's got numbers now. Q2 revenue was seven-point-eight billion, up from four-point-one a year ago, with Starlink accounting for over half. Those numbers come straight from the report. No anonymous sources. And here's the gap I've been waiting to measure. The roadshow sold that one-point-seven-five trillion valuation on the idea that Starlink profits would fund the AI push. The document says the spending spree is — quote — far from over. So the funding mechanism they pitched is still a promise, not a print. But listen to what Musk did on that call, Cassidy. A hundred-billion-dollar run-rate by December, with a payback period under a year for AI compute. He was re-opening the roadshow after the stock fell fifty percent from its June peak. Fifty percent off the peak, and the answer is a bigger number. Bold. I've sat on the issuer side of that exact call. The payback claim is the tell — you only volunteer that number when the market's screaming about your capex. It's a sales line aimed at retail, and the institutions had already discounted it going in. Ryan McMorrow, writing in Financial Times:
Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programmes in history to supply more than $150bn of artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic. Surging demand from Anthropic, in which Google is an investor, has led the Big Tech company to orchestrate a sprawling operation to supply its chips to the start-up, according to people involved in the project and corporate filings reviewed by the FT.
Two hundred billion dollars, more than $150bn of it in chips, and Anthropic hasn't sold a single public share. Google's building the whole runway before the plane even files. And this is what I love about the FT piece, Eric: they reviewed corporate filings. No “sources say” here. The web runs from Broadcom and Apollo to Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, even crypto miners. I can actually read that paper trail. And look who shows up again — Morgan Stanley. It led the SpaceX book we just covered, and it's also on the Nexus loan. When one syndicate keeps appearing across the equity and infrastructure sides, that tells you more about the ambition here than any price range does. Remember that $15bn Nexus campus down in Hubbard, Texas, with Google backstopping Anthropic's lease? Now it looks like one tile in a $200bn mosaic. Here's what nags me. Anthropic is stacking private credit on chip leases and data centre guarantees. When it finally files an S-1, how much of that off-balance-sheet architecture lands on page one, and how much gets buried in the commitments footnote? Page ninety-four, Cassidy. You'll find it. But that's the readiness issue — a company this entangled with its own investor's chips needs to tell a governance story before it gets to growth. Investor Daily, with Georgie Preston:
Having supported US equity returns for decades, the firm has warned de-equitisation is now going into reverse as rising issuance and fresh share supply from the AI IPO wave flood the market. De-equitisation refers to US companies buying back far more stock than they have issued over the past two decades, steadily shrinking the pool of shares available to investors.
Ninety One's Sahil Mahtani is putting a number on the tailwind everyone forgot about. De-equitisation added an estimated 0.7 points a year to US equity returns from 2015 to 2025, and he says it's now going into reverse. And notice what he's actually worried about: lock-up expiries more than listings. SpaceX listed June 12, the unlock starts tomorrow, and that's when tradable supply spikes. It's the supply story behind the earnings pop we just walked through. Right, but let's not pretend the market didn't see this coming. Every one of these deals ships with a lock-up calendar in the prospectus — institutions have modeled the August 6th cliff for months. Institutions have. Retail bought the debut-day headline. That asymmetry never shows up in the roadshow deck. Mahtani's flagging a regime change — the index quietly ran on scarcity for twenty years, and now you've got SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, three loss-makers, dumping fresh shares into it. That dilutes EPS across the whole thing, not just those names. So the pop you saw yesterday won't be the tape you read tomorrow. Same market, way more shares, and one fewer structural bid holding up the floor. Read the calendar, not the confetti. If you’re enjoying AI IPO Watch, subscribe or leave a review wherever you’re listening. Reviews help more people find the show, and your support helps us keep covering AI and markets.
We’ll be watching SpaceX’s December revenue run-rate checkpoint. Management’s targeting $100 billion. We’re also tracking its forecast to launch at least 1,000 next-generation V3 Starlink satellites within a year.
Links to every story are in the show notes if you want to dig deeper. That’s AI IPO Watch for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.