There is a version of this piece about grief. About strangers who never met Ozzy Osbourne deciding, with considerable conviction, that their emotional connection to his music gives them a meaningful say in what happens to his legacy. It does not. Grief is not ownership. The fans are not shareholders; the grief a Swindon Town supporter feels for the slow death by a thousand cuts each season does not give them a seat in the boardroom either. Interesting questions do exist here, possibly too many before we all reach for the comfort blankets of the bong and the sitar. But one view I do hold is that moral outrage from people whose lives were touched by someone else's art is not a controlling interest.
Anyway. Sombre and reflective is not really my natural register, and this week's article/rant can be more accurately summarized as follows:
Ozzy Osbourne, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk walk into a bar.
Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai are in the corner playing pool.
On 3 June, SpaceX filed its amended S-1 with the SEC, pricing its shares at $135 under the ticker SPCX, with net proceeds before expenses expected to reach approximately $74.4 billion. The company has valued itself at $1.75 trillion, a figure that would put Musk's personal holding above $600 billion and make him the world's first trillionaire.
The filing covers a combined entity incorporating xAI, Grok, X, and the COLOSSUS data center infrastructure, following SpaceX's acquisition of xAI in February 2026. Starlink remains the commercial engine: $3.26 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, $1.19 billion in operating income, 10.3 million subscribers in 164 markets. The AI segment tells a different story. Revenue of $818 million in Q1 against a $2.47 billion operating loss, with capital expenditure in that segment alone hitting $7.72 billion in the quarter. The full-year 2025 net loss was $4.9 billion. Legal exposure adds further colour, with over half a billion dollars flagged in anticipated costs covering deepfake lawsuits, patent claims, EU content moderation failures, and data breaches.
None of that will necessarily deter investors. The SpaceX listing bundles rockets, satellites, and a combined AI and social media operation into one offering, and Musk retains approximately 82.4% of voting power post-IPO. Buying in means buying him. That bet has paid out before.
Anthropic and the Art of Being Strategically Vague
Anthropic has filed confidentially. Most recently valued at $965 billion, it has submitted a draft S-1 without disclosing share counts or price ranges, with a listing expected to target $1 trillion or higher and potentially arrive as early as autumn 2026.
The valuation trajectory tells its own story: from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $965 billion in just over a year, driven by Claude Code, broad chatbot adoption, and a safety reputation that has made it the enterprise AI partner of choice.
For Amazon and Google, this is one of the most significant paper-to-cash conversion events in corporate history. Amazon's position spans convertible notes and nonvoting preferred stock worth approximately $74.2 billion on paper, with $16.8 billion in pre-tax gains booked from that position in Q1 2026 alone and a commitment to invest up to $20 billion more.
Court documents confirm Google holds roughly 14% in straight equity, worth approximately $135 billion at current valuations, with a further $40 billion commitment made in April. Microsoft, which committed $5 billion to Anthropic in late 2025, is also positioned to benefit, albeit from a rather smaller seat at the table.
The relationship between Anthropic and its largest backers runs deeper than equity. Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon's infrastructure over the next decade, while AWS sells Claude to enterprise customers via its Bedrock platform. They are not merely investor and investee; they are each other's infrastructure.
Watching two of the most anticipated IPOs in market history land in the same week, one from Musk whose legal assault on OpenAI was dismissed by a jury just days ago, and one from Amodei whose company was co-founded by former OpenAI alumni, Sam Altman's position is not enviable. OpenAI remains privately held. It is just not the one commanding the headlines.
There is one further detail Altman might find particularly galling. When Pope Leo XIV launched his AI encyclical in May, Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah was seated beside him at the Vatican. For every person who saw the image without reading all 245 paragraphs.....
If both listings achieve their target valuations, they will together represent somewhere between $2.75 trillion and $3.5 trillion in market capitalization arriving on public markets within months of each other. That is not a market event; it is a gravitational field. Bezos and Pichai will be fine, their pool game interrupted only by notifications confirming their Anthropic stake has gone up again. As for Mark Zuckerberg, he does* not appear anywhere in this story. Meta, it seems, decided to build its own bar.
The Ozzy avatar will eventually prompt the questions I originally planned to write about, just not this week. This week, the money spoke louder. It usually does.
