The Biggest IPO in History Just Went Underwater. Its Most Famous Backer Calls That "Day One."

On June 12, SpaceX priced the largest initial public offering the market has ever seen — $135 a share, raising $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk's rocket-and-satellite company at roughly $2 trillion. The shares began trading near $150, touched an all-time high above $225 within days, and then the air came out. By mid-July the stock had broken below its own $135 IPO price — the biggest public debut on record now trading underwater.

That same stretch is when the billionaire most identified with the deal, Ron Baron of Baron Capital, tripled down rather than taking profits. He bought another $1 billion of SpaceX shares in the offering, on top of the roughly $2 billion his firm had spread across 27 private rounds since 2017, lifting the stake to about $25 billion. His prediction is not that the stock is cheap. It's that SpaceX will become the world's biggest company, worth $20 trillion to $40 trillion within a decade, and that his position could still rise thirtyfold. "I think we're going to make hundreds of billions of dollars."

Hold those two facts together, because the gap between them is the whole debate about the future of IPOs.

A price that quibbles with its own seller

The bear case was on paper the moment the deal priced. Morningstar valued SpaceX at $63 a share before the IPO — about 53% below the $135 offering — attributing the enthusiasm to "excessive certainty" around unproven projects: reusable Starship operations and data centers in orbit. Set Baron against that and you get the cleanest version of the disagreement available anywhere in markets right now: one side sees the early bends of a curve that could be worth tens of trillions of dollars; the other is willing to pay roughly twice what a sober sum-of-the-parts says the existing business is worth.

The market, at least initially, sided with the math. A debut that breaks below its offering price within a month is the crowd that paid the sticker having second thoughts — the classic sign that the IPO day pop was institutional allocation chasing under-priced shares, not an endorsement for the retail buyer arriving late.

Two different clocks, running at different speeds

Here is where the macro lens does the work. Baron's call and the market's verdict are not actually competing readings of the same thing — they are answers to different questions, because they run on different clocks.

What Baron is making is a technology-clock call. It is the Exponential Age thesis applied to one company: the compression of time, where intelligence, compute, satellites, and capital formation move faster than institutional reflexes. In that frame "day one" is literal — a company that generates tens of billions and could plausibly grow revenue an order of magnitude by the end of the decade (Goldman projects its AI revenue alone going from just over $3 billion in 2025 to over $300 billion by 2030) is being priced for what it will become, not for what it books today. The question on that clock is not whether disruption happens but how fast. Ten to forty trillion looks preposterous — until the curve bends.

What the market is pricing is the liquidity-and-valuation clock. That clock is the master driver of risk assets, and it has a habit of moving faster than anyone expects when it turns. And IPOs are procyclical in a way that matters: going public is when insiders and early investors sell into the strongest demand they will ever see. A record IPO year is not the market confirming that assets are fairly valued; it is the market at the moment those who hold the stock decide the exit is open.

Why this year feels different, and why that's the point

The wave is real and it is enormous. U.S. IPO proceeds for 2026 were already a record by July, and the biggest names are still to come — Anthropic reportedly targeting a $2 trillion listing that could top even SpaceX, OpenAI working toward roughly a trillion. Put SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic together and you have about $3 trillion of market cap arriving through the public window in the space of a year. This is not a trickle; it is the private market's decade of venture-built AI companies converting into public positions at the same moment.

That is exactly the setup worth being analytical about. The secular story — the technology clock — argues these are the early-compounding asymmetries of a genuine adoption curve, and that the biggest names in AI and space reaching public markets is the beginning of them being owned by everyone. The cyclical reality is equally clear: every one of these deals is a liquidity event, a chance for the people who got in early to monetize at elevated prices, and history clusters them at the top of the risk cycle rather than the bottom. Both statements are true and neither cancels the other.

The mistake — for the new shareholder, the holder, the person watching from the sidelines — is to collapse them into one. A trillion-dollar IPO that trades below its price within a month does not falsify the AI thesis. And "it's day one of a $40 trillion company" is not a reason to buy at IPO day prices when the person saying it bought his first shares at a fraction of the sticker and has already earned most of his return. The asymmetry was captured early and privately. By the time the crowdfunding of America is complete at $135 a share, the pricing is set by the crowd, not by the believers.

None of this needs you to resolve whether SpaceX is a $10 trillion or $40 trillion company — a question nobody can answer and everyone is allowed a view on. The useful discipline is simpler: keep the two clocks straight. Let the technology curve tell you what is real over years, and let liquidity — the lead indicators, the breadth of the AI backlog, the warmth of the risk appetite that is financing all these deals at once — tell you where you are in the cycle now. When a market can produce the biggest IPO in history and leave it underwater in a month, the two clocks are disagreeing loudly. That disagreement, more than any single forecast, is the future of IPOs.