This week SpaceX is set to pull off the largest IPO in history; and before the year is out, OpenAI and Anthropic could follow. This means the global financial plumbing that Malaysian savers quietly rely on will never look the same.
Wall Street is about to do something it has never done before.
This week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX; and when it does, it will shatter every record in the IPO book.
The numbers are difficult to comprehend. According to its amended filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX is selling 555.6 million shares at a fixed US$135 each, raising roughly US$75 billion (RM302 billion). That is no typo.
To put that in perspective, the previous record holder, Saudi Aramco, raised US$25.6 billion (RM103 billion) back in 2019. This means SpaceX is set to raise nearly three times that in a single offering.
It would value the company at about US$1.77 trillion (RM7.1 trillion), making it the seventh most valuable listed company in America overnight, worth more than Berkshire Hathaway and even Musk’s own Tesla.
The entire haul from all 60 companies that listed on Bursa Malaysia last year, our busiest IPO year in two decades, was around RM5.5 billion. SpaceX is set to raise more than 50 times that in a single offering.
This is not just a rocket company either. After absorbing Musk’s artificial intelligence outfit xAI in an all-stock deal earlier this year, the company going public is now a satellite-internet and AI conglomerate rolled into one.
But here is the part that should make your jaw drop. SpaceX may end up being only the third biggest story of the year.
Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, confidentially filed for its own IPO on 1 June, fresh off a US$65 billion (RM262 billion) funding round that valued it at US$965 billion (RM3.9 trillion).
Bankers reportedly expect it to debut above the trillion-dollar mark, possibly as early as October.
Its great rival OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, is reportedly not far behind. After a colossal US$122 billion (RM492 billion) raise in March valued it at US$852 billion (RM3.4 trillion), it is said to be working quietly with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley toward a listing that could land later this year or in early 2027.
Neither timeline, however, is confirmed.
Three companies, each potentially worth a trillion dollars or more, all coming to market in the space of a few months. It has simply never happened before.
And they are not alone. Renaissance Capital and others tip a parade of heavyweights to follow, including payments giant Stripe, data firm Databricks and fintech Revolut, each valued in the tens of billions.
After a 2025 in which global IPOs raised US$171.8 billion, the consultancy EY has flagged 2026 as a potential “AI-led mega wave”. That looks like an understatement.
What does that mean for global markets? A flood of supply this large changes the weather for everyone. When trillions of dollars of new stock hit the market in a single year, that money has to come from somewhere, and it gets pulled out of existing holdings.
The pressing question on Wall Street, as Fortune bluntly put it, is whether public markets can even absorb three trillion-dollar listings in one summer. If enthusiasm holds, we get a euphoric melt-up. If it cracks, we get an almighty hangover, with the AI darlings dragging everything down.
There is also the matter of concentration. Global index funds are already stuffed with a handful of giant American technology names. Bolting SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI onto that pile makes the world’s savings even more dependent on a single sector behaving itself.
You might think all this is a faraway American circus. It is not, and here is why.
The moment SpaceX qualifies for the Nasdaq-100, every index fund tracking that benchmark is mechanically forced to buy it. That includes passive funds inside many Malaysian unit trusts and, in all likelihood, slices of the retirement money managed by the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and KWAP, the civil service pension fund.
The EPF held about 39% of its assets in international investments as of September 2025, while KWAP is building its foreign book towards a 30% target. The exposure is real, and a slice of it is automatic.
The contrast with home is stark. While American mega-caps raise hundreds of billions in an afternoon, Bursa Malaysia, for all its record 60 listings last year, is fighting just to keep foreign money from leaving. Foreign investors pulled a net RM22.6 billion out of our market in 2025, and early June 2026 saw another RM2.53 billion exit in a single week.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of this moment. The world’s capital is being vacuumed towards a tiny cluster of American titans, and a small open economy like ours feels both the pull and the wobble.
History is being written in New York, but the aftershocks will be felt in Kuala Lumpurr too.
So, buckle up. - FMT
The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.
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