Two companies with around $2 trillion in combined value are both heading to public markets within a year.
Only two firms in U.S. history have ever closed their first trading day above $100 billion. Musk and Altman are about to find out what investors think of them.
A federal advisory jury in Oakland decided Monday that Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and Sam Altman. The suit took aim at the company's shift from nonprofit to for-profit.
District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the decision. The court did not rule on whether Musk's "breach of charitable trust" claim had merit, only that he filed past the three-year deadline to sue.
Musk called the decision a "calendar technicality" on X, and his attorneys said he will appeal to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Ross Gerber, a long-time Musk backer, was less kind.
"He's perceived as being a sore loser. Another guy is successful and he's jealous," Gerber said.
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SpaceX plans to file its IPO paperwork as soon as this week. Its price tag hit $1.25 trillion in February after the merger with Musk's AI startup xAI.
The company also owns Starlink and X (formerly Twitter). Last month it signed a deal giving it the right to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion.
OpenAI is valued at more than $850 billion and is eyeing its own market debut later this year. It has raised more than $180 billion in private funding, and it is still burning cash fast.
Rival Anthropic has been winning in enterprise and AI coding. It just announced a new enterprise AI services unit, AI agents for financial services, and a major compute deal at xAI's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
Jake Dollarhide, CEO of Longbow Asset Management, said order of arrival matters. SpaceX going first could grab the first-mover bump, while OpenAI risks ending up third if Anthropic prices in between.
Inside OpenAI, the upper ranks are shifting. Greg Brockman took over product strategy in April after Fidji Simo went on medical leave, and that change is now formal.
Investors buying these IPOs are not just buying AI exposure. They are buying the founders.
Public pension funds managing more than $1 trillion sent SpaceX a letter last week. They called out the firm's "novel and extreme governance structure" and Musk's split time across SpaceX, Tesla, X, and xAI.
Altman has his own baggage from the OpenAI board that briefly fired him in 2023. That board said he was not "consistently candid," and Musk's lawyers spent weeks reminding investors of it.
"I was not trying to deceive the board," Altman testified at trial.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said the trial was a sideshow next to what comes next.
"The big picture is the theater is now done. Now we get to the substance of seeing what these companies can do to really build massive businesses around AI," Munster said.
The court case is done, and the pricing call comes next.
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