SpaceX went public this week in the largest IPO ever, pushing Elon Musk past the trillionaire mark and firing the starting gun on what TechCrunch AI is calling a hot IPO summer for artificial intelligence. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, reporters Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec, and Sean O’Kane broke down what this means, and the short version is that SpaceX is just the opening act. OpenAI and Anthropic have both confidentially filed to go public, and the race to be first is already heating up.
What stands out here isn’t the Musk headline. It’s the shift in where public market money is flowing.
From FAANG to MANGOS
Korosec pointed to a framing from TechCrunch’s Julie Bort that sums up the moment: “It’s not FAANG anymore, it’s MANGOS.” The old acronym stood for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. The new lineup looks very different:
- M: Meta
- A: Anthropic
- N: NVIDIA
- G: Google
- O: OpenAI
- S: SpaceX
Notice what changed. Netflix, a giant consumer streaming service, gets booted. In its place sit AI labs and deeptech. As Korosec put it, the vast pool of capital in public markets is shifting “away from consumer and social networks and towards, specifically, AI labs and other, more innovative deeptech, such as SpaceX.”
That’s a real signal. For years the biggest public tech names were built on ads, social feeds, and subscriptions. The new center of gravity is companies that burn enormous cash chasing frontier technology.
SpaceX is stress testing the rules
O’Kane’s read is that SpaceX isn’t just sucking up a huge chunk of available capital. It’s testing how much a public company can be controlled by one person, and how long investors will tolerate a “we’ll lose money forever” posture.
His description of the playbook is sharp. SpaceX is taking the most extreme parts of Google’s and Meta’s early-2000s IPOs, the founder-control structures, and mashing them up with Amazon’s long-game tolerance for losses. The open question is whether OpenAI and Anthropic copy that script or deliberately present themselves as something different.
This matters for anyone watching the AI industry. The terms SpaceX sets, on governance, on profitability timelines, on how much power founders keep, could become the template every AI lab follows to Wall Street.
Why OpenAI and Anthropic are racing the clock
There’s a timing game underneath all this. According to the TechCrunch AI discussion, some analysts think OpenAI and Anthropic each want to go before the other, because there’s only a finite amount of capital and investor attention to go around. At some point, Ha noted, these sky-high valuations “have to start coming back down to Earth,” so both labs may be scrambling to beat their rival to market.
Korosec’s warning is worth repeating: that’s short-term thinking. You’re already seeing OpenAI talk about slashing prices, and both will compete on the IPO calendar. But the smarter move is the long-term play, not winning a sprint to file first.
The ripple effect is the real story
The part Korosec finds most interesting isn’t the headline IPOs at all. It’s the wave of smaller companies raising money on the back of SpaceX’s success. While the podcast was recording, a company called Quantum Space announced a SPAC, clearly trying to ride the SpaceX wave. Other startups are raising capital on the promise of orbital data centers, a concept SpaceX helped popularize.
Most of those companies won’t go public themselves. But they’re building real businesses on the bet that SpaceX proves the model works. That’s how a single mega-IPO reshapes a whole market.
What to watch next
A few things to keep an eye on as the summer unfolds:
- Which AI lab files first, OpenAI or Anthropic, and whether the timing race forces ugly trade-offs.
- Whether they emulate SpaceX’s founder-control structure or pitch investors a different governance story.
- The SPAC and fundraising ripple from startups chasing space data centers and adjacent bets.
The IPO window many thought was stuck shut is open again, and AI labs are the ones walking through it. For a deeper look at the full conversation, check the original report from TechCrunch AI.