The three major anticipated initial public offerings (IPOs) of 2026 received an apparent strong endorsement on June 1 when arguably the most popular CEO in the world – Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) Jensen Huang – compared investing in them to making early purchases in some of the biggest technology companies in the world.
Specifically, as part of a wider discussion on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the two most prominent artificial intelligence (AI) companies – OpenAI and Anthropic – Huang opined on CNBC that purchasing their equity once it reaches the public market will be akin to being an early large investor in Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), or Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META).
$1,000 invested in Google, Meta, and Amazon at IPO would be worth this much in 2026
Quantifying the endorsement, Google went public in 2004 at – after adjusting for stock splits – about $2.71 and is, at press time on June 2, 2026, changing hands at $376.37. Thus, buying $1,000 worth of GOOGL as soon as it became available would have turned into $138,882.
Meta stock was changing hands at approximately $38 in 2012 and rose 1,470% to $600, turning the hypothetical $1,000 investment into $15,706. Lastly, Amazon went from $0.09 in 1997 to $261.26 in 2026, turning a similar counterfactual buy into $2.9 million.
By press time on June 2, SpaceX is closest to its IPO with a scheduled launch on June 12. The firm intends to raise up to $80 billion at a valuation of up to $2 trillion.
Though still lacking an offering date, Anthropic also moved closer on June 1 with a confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission signalling, if nothing else, a clear intent to go public.
Thus, OpenAI remains the only of the three firms endorsed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that still has a purely speculative 2026 IPO.
Why SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon IPOs
Elsewhere, SpaceX’s hoped-for valuation signals the first major difference when compared with Google, Amazon, or Meta.
At its IPO, Alphabet was valued at approximately $23 billion, Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce giant at just under half a billion, and Facebook – the name of Mark Zuckerberg’s company at the time – at $104 billion.
Therefore, for SpaceX to match the success of Amazon, it would have to reach a valuation of $5.8 quadrillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. The less ambitious goal of being as lucrative an investment as Meta Platforms would still demand it grow to $31.4 trillion by 2040.
While information on OpenAI and Anthropic is less clear, most recent funding rounds indicate both companies are valued at approximately $1 trillion, implying Jensen Huang estimates their worth at as high as $15 trillion by 2040 and possibly even $3 quadrillion by 2060.
The British think tank Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated in December 2025 that the U.S. GDP in 2040 would amount to just under $53 trillion.
Why SpaceX stock is likely to skyrocket after IPO despite extreme valuation
Lastly, while the extreme valuation of the three companies with anticipated IPOs paired with their dubious profitability indicates price discovery will be turbulent, recent changes to stock market indices hint at powerful and nearly immediate tailwinds.
Specifically, new rules permit companies that go public at exceptionally high market capitalizations to be included in the Nasdaq-100 and its peers within weeks of the initial offering.
Therefore, SpaceX is all but guaranteed, and Anthropic and OpenAI are likely to enjoy rampant buying activity from index-tracking funds.
Such a setup is not bereft of controversy since it will all but prevent typical price discovery while forcing significant demand that insiders – especially in the case of the SpaceX IPO – can sell into.
Furthermore, some AI critics speculate that part of the motivation for the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs – especially since the CFO of the maker of ChatGPT indicated the company is not ready to go public – is to provide exit liquidity to highly concentrated venture capital and strained private credit.
Jensen Huang’s endorsement should also be taken with a grain of salt since all three companies are major customers of Nvidia – a fact that might or might not have made him biased in his assessment.
Featured image via Shutterstock
