Google IPO’d in 2004.
Before the IPO, Google had raised about $26 million total in two private rounds. The first was a million-dollar round in 1998 with Jeff Bezos in there as one of the early backers.
The second was $25 million led by Sequoia Capital. Then they went public and raised $1.67 billion in the IPO itself.
Anthropic raised $65 billion yesterday. One round. Series H.
That’s just the alphabet, baby, that’s when you run out of letters. Eighth named funding round this company has done, and they’ve now pulled in well over $100 billion in private capital.
Valuation was $380 billion in February. It’s basically sitting at a trillion now. That just happened since February.
SpaceX IPOs June 12. Raising $75 billion. Valuation around $1.8 trillion. Largest IPO in market history. Two weeks out.
I want people to get their arms around what this actually is. In 20 years, the scale of private capital being raised before a company even goes public has gone up a thousand times.
People are going to say the dollar got devalued. Totally agree with that. But you’re not looking at inflation here.
You’re looking at the largest leveraging in any marketplace in any history. This makes tulip bulbs look like nothing.
Pretty wild numbers when you start to get it. There’s not going to be anything left by the time SpaceX actually comes into the IPO.
That’s my rant.
But here’s what comes next.
What Happens After June 12
Most people hear “added to a major index” and go, who cares. I’m going to tell you why it matters.
SpaceX IPOs at $1.8 trillion and it’s instantly one of the largest companies in the world. Every passive index fund tracking the Nasdaq-100 and the S&P 500 has to figure out how to own it. The exchanges have already been rewriting the rules to make that possible. That has never happened before.
The Nasdaq-100 add comes first. About 15 trading days after the IPO. Call it late June or early July.
Every QQQ fund globally has to buy SPCX in that window. You get added to the Vanguard 500, you’re gold, Jerry. That’s exactly what’s happening here.
S&P 500 add takes longer. Probably Q4 or Q1 of 2027 under the new six-month seasoning waiver they’re proposing. Russell 1000 comes at the September or December reconstitution.
Conservative estimates of the mechanical forced buying across SPY, QQQ, and Russell trackers come in at $15 to $30 billion. Aggressive numbers push past $200 billion.
And here’s the part. Only about 5% of SpaceX’s float is being listed at the IPO. Tiny share count meeting a wall of forced passive demand on a schedule everybody can see coming.
Setups like that don’t show up often, and when they do the dealer hedging gets violent.
What I’m Doing
I’m not telling anybody to buy SpaceX on day one. The first few days of any mega-IPO are a coin flip. Facebook in 2012 is a perfectly good reminder of how badly an unsupported debut can go. I was around for that one. We were laughing when it dropped to 17.
I’m watching the window after it settles in, into the Nasdaq-100 add. That’s where the mechanical buying gets real. Tiny float, forced demand, known date on the calendar. That’s a real setup.
Here’s the part nobody’s mentioning. When index funds have to buy SPCX, they’re selling something to fund it. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, every other constituent. The forced selling on the other side of the SpaceX add is its own trade. The headlines are going to miss it entirely.
It’s getting crazy out there. We’re going to be all over this in the TheoTrade room every morning between now and the IPO. Come work through it with us.
Join us in the TheoTrade room.
To your success,
Don Kaufman
