Mega-IPOs are coming soon and advisors are preparing clients for their arrival

Mega-IPOs are back and advisors are preparing their clients for takeoff.

SpaceX filed its public S-1 prospectus with the SEC last week, disclosing for the first time the audited financials of its combined SpaceX-xAI entity. The company showed $18.67 billion in consolidated 2025 revenue following the February 2026 all-stock acquisition of xAI. SpaceX is targeting a public listing as early as September 2026 at a valuation above $1 trillion.

OpenAI also filed its S-1 IPO prospectus with the SEC last week, targeting a fourth quarter 2026 public listing at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will be leading the deal.

Meanwhile, OpenAi’s rival Anthropic raised $65 billion in a funding round announced last Thursday, valuing the company at $965 billion. Anthropic is reportedly gunning for a public listing as soon as October 2026.

With all these massive offerings ready to hit the market in the coming months, there is increasing discussion in wealth management offices nationwide as to how to approach them, especially with clients reportedly clamoring for allocations.  

Ed Cofrancesco, CEO of International Assets Advisory, for one, says advisors may want to consider a phased entry into these highly publicized names versus chasing initial demand given their volatility and potential for overpricing at launch. Still, he realizes that while it may seem a prudent strategy to leg into a name, or wait a while before jumping in, it also may prove ineffective.

“In the case of Facebook, that course of action would have worked out very well. In many other instances, following that strategy would have left you waiting at the dock for a ship that had already sailed and was never to return,” said Cofrancesco, adding that he prefers a more cautious strategy when it comes to IPOs for clients. 

Dean Rubino, CEO of KPC Private Funds, points out that 20 years ago many of today’s high-growth companies likely would have gone public much earlier because they needed access to growth capital. Today, sovereign wealth funds, private equity firms, venture investors, and other large pools of private capital are providing that funding privately, allowing companies to remain private longer while achieving far greater scale and maturity before entering the public markets. In his view, the more important question for investors is whether most of the enterprise value creation is now happening pre-IPO instead of post-IPO.

“That answer is probably company-specific, but it’s increasingly clear that investors waiting until after an IPO may be accessing a much more mature phase of the growth cycle,” Rubino said.

Rubino adds that most advisors need investments to appear on custodial statements and integrate into their existing reporting and compliance infrastructure. As a result, that has made institutional-quality pre-IPO exposure difficult to access in a scalable way for advisors and their clients. He says that’s why advisors often frame post-IPO investing as the prudent approach because it’s more operationally familiar and liquid. But investors should recognize that waiting also means potentially missing earlier stages of value creation, according to Rubino.

“The key is disciplined sizing and understanding that these are long-duration investments tied more to future market dominance than near-term fundamentals,” Rubino said.

Finally, Abe Sheikh, chief investment officer at Cordoba Advisory Partners (CAP), says investors should stay away from these IPOs at their current prices and wait for more attractive entry points. Buying these stocks at such elevated valuations may prove to be unattractive long-term, given how much growth is already priced in, according to Sheikh.

“Patience is likely to be rewarded, as the initial exuberance gives way to a more realistic valuation of the underlying businesses. The volatility is likely to be very substantial in the short term, but once the longer-term growth picture becomes clearer, together with more attractive pricing, it could be worth buying shares at the right discounted price,” Sheikh said.

“Both SpaceX and OpenAI are great businesses. Our primary concern centers around high valuations, which is likely to limit future returns at current prices. It is worth remembering that markets swing from greed to fear and then back, so patient investors are often rewarded handsomely,” Sheikh added.