SpaceX counts on $2 trillion and a downturn in interest in OpenAI: What's important about the IPO by April 5

SpaceX has applied for a listing in time to go public in time for Elon Musk's birthday and expects to be valued at more than $2 trillion. European tank maker Leopard 2 and Leclerc plans to raise up to €5 billion this summer. Professional investors lost interest in OpenAI shares in the run-up to the offering, seeing Anthropic as an alternative. The main IPO market events of the week are in our selection.

- Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX has confidentially filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO. Placement may become the largest in history: according to sources of the Financial Times, SpaceX hopes to raise about $75 billion. According to sources Bloomberg, the company expects that it will be valued at more than $2 trillion - it is more expensive than Tesla, and almost all companies in the S & P 500 index, except for five. Filing now allows the listing in June, as Musk planned: in this month will be his birthday and the convergence of Jupiter and Venus. SpaceX executives have been promising for years to delay going public until regular missions to Mars begin. In 2025, however, the company began forcing a listing to fund an orbital data center project designed to give Musk dominance in AI.

- Netherlands-based KNDS, maker of Leopard 2 and Leclerc tanks, plans to raise up to €5 billion this summer in the largest European IPO in years, Bloomberg sources say. The defense holding company's potential valuation could reach €25 billion. According to Bloomberg, KNDS shares owned by the French government and the founding family - owners of Germany's Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW), which merged with French state-owned Nexter Systems in 2015 to create KNDS - will be listed. The defense holding company announced plans for a dual listing in Paris and Frankfurt in 2025. The company is preparing to go public with a large-scale expansion of its business: it plans to triple its capacity in the next few years.

- Canadian gold producer Barrick Mining Corp. has attracted Goldman Sachs to organize an IPO of its North American assets, sources told Bloomberg. Barrick plans to spin off its key gold mines, separating the North American business from operations in riskier jurisdictions, including Ma and Pakistan. In the deal, the spun-off business could be valued at more than $60 billion, the agency writes.

- Shares of oilfield services company HMH Holding fell 3.6% on the day of its debut on the Nasdaq exchange. The IPO of the drilling equipment supplier took place amid market volatility and high geopolitical uncertainty. The joint venture between Baker Hughes and Norway's Akastor raised $210.4 million by selling securities at $20 apiece. The final price was closer to the lower end of the announced range of $19-22, and the valuation of the entire business amounted to about $862 million. Baker Hughes and Akastor merged their core assets in 2021 and planned to list HMH in the second half of 2024, but due to the downturn in the industry it had to be postponed. The company decided to go public at a time when the Iranian crisis triggered a sharp rise in oil prices.

- SpaceX has gotten the Nasdaq exchange to shorten the timeframe for large new issuers to be included in the main Nasdaq-100 index. Now the market giants will be able to enter the list after only 15 days of trading instead of the previous three months, if their value allows them to enter the top 40. The exchange also eliminated the requirement for a minimum free float, which previously had to be at least 10%. The reform will take effect on Ma 1 and will provide SpaceX with quick access to more than $600 billion in investment fund capital. Similar changes to the listing rules are now being discussed by other major stock index providers, such as S&P Dow Jones and FTSE Russell.

- OpenAI shares are losing popularity on the secondary market, as investors began to switch en masse to its main competitor - Anthropic, Bloomberg found out. Ken Smith, head of Next Round Capital, told the agency that in recent weeks he could not find buyers for OpenAI securities among his hundreds of institutional clients. Instead, he said, they have expressed a willingness to put about $2 billion toward acquiring stakes in Anthropic. Both startups are preparing to go public in 2026 and until then prohibit the resale of shares without their consent, but access to them exists on many platforms, states Bloomberg. According to Augment co-founder Adam Crowley, the impressive difference in market valuation between OpenAI ($852 billion) and Anthropic ($380 billion) encourages investors to buy shares of the latter in anticipation of their future growth.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor