Anthropic IPO buyers have more influence on price than SpaceX

Anthropic PBC will try next week to take SpaceX’s title of the biggest public listing of all time, but unlike Elon Musk’s conglomerate, major investors will have more sway on its initial share price at a time when the artificial-intelligence trade is in flux.

The Claude developer is gauging interest in its shares at a range of $70 to $78 for its initial public offering, a departure from SpaceX, which used a take-it-or-leave-it approach by setting a fixed price of $135 a share in the marketing phase.

And while Anthropic wants the bragging rights of having the biggest IPO ever, some market watchers are warning that it shouldn’t be too aggressive on pricing so institutional investors will feel like they got a fair price and shares will have room to rise on day one.


“Anthropic is doing a more conventional roadshow and when you set the IPO price based on institutional demand that makes it less likely to trade below the IPO,” said Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst for late-stage company research at Pitchbook.

But there are no guarantees. A challenging market backdrop — including the ouster of Jensen Huang at Nvidia Corp. — has made final stages of Anthropic’s march to public markets more complicated than SpaceX’s $86.2 billion listing in June.

SpaceX, whose shares now trade 3% above its IPO price, benefited from coming to market in a quarter in which the Nasdaq 100 Index jumped nearly 28%. The same index is down about 7% in the last three months after a US interest-rate hike, widespread worries about an oversupply of AI debt and a midterm election result where the data centers that power models like ChatGPT and Claude drew the ire of voters. Those factors have hushed earlier whispers about Anthropic having a $2 trillion valuation.

“It seems like they really are listening to the market,” said Andy Tang, a partner at venture capital firm Draper Associates and a former technology investment banker. “They are bringing the IPO at a more conservative level.”

Anthropic is now targeting a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion. It plans to raise as much as $64.4 billion in the IPO and $26 billion in a private placement, a total that would surpass SpaceX’s IPO.

Jeff Zell, a partner and senior research analyst at IPO Boutique, also said “the timing likely contributed to Anthropic’s lighter valuation and lighter cash raise.”

Private Placement

The private placement is another difference between the two listings. While SpaceX’s IPO went ahead without explicit anchor investors, Anthropic has lined up $26 billion from seven tech companies led by Alphabet Inc. and Nvidia.

The massive placement sends a positive signal to investors about outside support in choppy markets, said David Erickson, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and the former global head of equity capital markets at Barclays Plc. The transaction also doesn’t come with banking fees, which Anthropic will pay on the actual IPO.

Investors in the placement won’t be able to sell their shares until they’re registered at a later date. And since they’re a part of Anthropic’s compute supply chain, they have an interest in maintaining their position for the long term, Erickson added.

The respective companies have another key difference: a long acquaintance with public markets. Musk has worked with bankers for well over a decade to raise capital for Tesla Inc., while Anthropic has relative newbie status as a five-year-old company.

“Obviously Elon Musk has had significant experience dealing with Wall Street, so he dictated the terms, whereas Anthropic has not had that experience before and I assume are doing what the banks recommend,” Erickson said.