Two analysts looked at the same SpaceX stock chart and reached opposite conclusions about what it means for OpenAI.
Arete's Andrew Beale reportedly slapped a $401 price target on SpaceX. Morningstar's Nicolas Owens reportedly called it a sell at $62. Same company, same filings, same 30% slide from the intraday peak—a spread of roughly 6.5x between the bull and the bear.
That gap is the whole story. It isn't noise around a fair value the market hasn't found yet. It's the sound of a valuation with nothing underneath it, and it's the thing OpenAI's advisors are quietly telling Sam Altman to wait out.
It's the sound of a valuation with nothing underneath it, and it's the thing OpenAI's advisors are quietly telling Sam Altman to wait out.
Last week, we covered the pre-IPO thesis on SpaceX—the record raise, the trillion-dollar ambition, the open question of whether public markets would swallow it. This week the answer arrived: they didn't, not cleanly. The stock listed, spiked as much as 50% above its open, then gave back most of the gain, settling around its opening price. And that round trip is now reportedly pushing OpenAI's own debut to 2027.
Here is the tidy story the advisors are reportedly selling. SpaceX went public, the tape got choppy, the AI trade wobbled, so the smart move is to wait for calmer conditions before OpenAI steps into the arena. The New York Times reports advisors gave Altman a binary: go public in 2027 at the trillion-dollar tag he wants, or move faster at a lower price. He reportedly called anything below $1 trillion a "nonstarter."
Call the SpaceX slide "volatility" and the prescription writes itself—wait for the window to reopen.
But that's a misdiagnosis. What advisors are labeling volatility is the market doing precisely what it's supposed to do to a price that, in Scott Galloway's word, has "no anchor."
Look at what SpaceX actually asked investors to accept. At its $1.75 trillion target, the stock priced at roughly 94 times trailing revenue on $18.7 billion in sales, per Galloway. For comparison, Palantir—the richest price-to-sales name in the entire S&P 500—trades around 67 times.
The underwriters knew it needed a comp. Galloway notes they reached for Boeing, then AT&T, then Palantir, then GE Vernova, then Vertiv. None fit. That's not a rounding error in the pitch deck; it's the pitch deck admitting it has no floor.
So the bankers replaced the comp with a story, per Galloway: a total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy. Inside that number sits $22.7 trillion of projected enterprise application revenue—about 30 times the current enterprise software market.
When your justification for a price is "imagine a market the size of America," you haven't anchored the valuation. You've abandoned the idea of one.
The tell was in the allocation. A typical IPO reserves 5% to 10% of shares for retail, per Galloway. SpaceX pushed as much as 30% out through Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, SoFi, and E*Trade.
Galloway read that oversized retail slice for what it was: institutions wouldn't absorb the shares at that price, so the deal got routed to individuals who would. That's not a demand signal. It's the professionals declining to catch the thing, and the stock's subsequent fall back to its opening price is what that decision looks like on a chart.
None of this is seasonal. This is the point OpenAI's advisors are missing when they frame 2027 as a calmer window.
Jefferies reportedly ran the numbers on every $10 billion-plus IPO over the past 26 years. First-week return: 26.5% on average. One year later: up just 3.5%.
That collapse from the debut pop to the twelve-month reality isn't a function of which quarter you list in. It's structural. The bigger the offering, the more the price runs on narrative at the open—and the more it reverts once the market has time to look for an anchor and fails to find one.
So "wait for a better window" is a category error. The volatility isn't in the season. It's in the size.
You don't dodge a 94x-revenue reckoning by scheduling it for 2027. You just schedule it for 2027.
And here's the part that should worry OpenAI's advisors more than the calendar: waiting doesn't improve the comps. It degrades them.
Consider what the AI IPO shelf actually looks like right now. Cerebras, the year's largest listing before SpaceX, is reportedly down 50% from its opening price about a month after its debut, its first quarter as a public company having disappointed. SpaceX's own analyst coverage is splitting from $62 to $401 the moment the quiet period lifts.
Those are the reference points a future OpenAI deal inherits. A trillion-dollar AI debut in 2027 gets priced against a memory of Cerebras halving and SpaceX round-tripping—hardly the calm tape the delay is supposed to buy.
And the economics underneath OpenAI don't help the anchor problem either. The company reportedly did about $13 billion in revenue in 2025 against an operating loss near $21 billion, wants to triple revenue this year, and has watched ChatGPT usage stall around 900 million—short of the billion it expected.
At $1 trillion on that base, OpenAI is asking the market to accept the same thing SpaceX asked: price the story, not the statements. The advisors calling for delay are treating that as a timing problem when it's a comp problem, and the comps get worse the longer everyone waits for a name in this cohort to trade well.
The broader skepticism doesn't make this easier. The same doubt now pressuring the whole complex—the worry that AI returns live in some future quarter that never quite arrives—is exactly what's leaving these valuations without a public peer to lean on. When investors stop taking the future on faith, a TAM the size of America stops functioning as a price.
Which reframes what the "chill" in the pipeline actually is. It's not a pause button that resets to green in 2027.
It's the market refusing to write trillion-dollar checks against valuations that can't name a comparable. SpaceX proved a mega-cap AI-adjacent name can reach a record debut on narrative—and proved just as fast that narrative doesn't hold the price once institutions step back and retail is left holding a third of the float.
Anthropic is queued directly behind, having confidentially filed earlier this month. So OpenAI's delay isn't just about OpenAI; it sets the tone for the whole cohort's willingness to test public markets.
The lesson isn't that the window is closed. It's that the window was never the variable.
Altman can wait until 2027, and the trillion-dollar tag will still meet the same question SpaceX met in June: what is this actually worth, measured against what? Until one of these companies can answer that with a comp instead of a story, the reckoning doesn't get dodged by patience.
It just gets a later date on the calendar—and a worse set of comparables waiting when it arrives.