Back in May, hedge fund manager Michael Burry (yes, the investor Christian Bale played in The Big Short) posted on X that the combined public debuts of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could raise as much capital as the roughly 300 tech companies that went public during the 2000 dot-com boom. He attached a chart from that era showing the rise and the crash that followed, and the point was hard to miss: massive capital raises don't always end the way everyone hopes.
Three months later, two of those three names have already tested his theory.
On Kalshi, where traders track which companies will officially confirm an IPO this year, that leaves a narrower, more interesting question: which of the remaining hopefuls can actually close the deal before December, and which ones are more likely to spill into 2027?
SpaceX And Jersey Mike's: The IPOs Already Confirmed
SpaceX isn't the only one whose outcome barely needs a market anymore. The rocket company priced its Nasdaq debut on June 12 at roughly $1.75 trillion, and shares have traded above the offer price ever since.
Jersey Mike's has since joined it. Blackstone, which took a majority stake in the sandwich chain back in 2024, walked it through a fast public process: after filing its S-1 on July 2 and updating it on July 20, Jersey Mike's priced its IPO at $23 a share on July 29 and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JMKE the next morning.
Anthropic Is Setting The Pace
That leaves Anthropic, OpenAI, and Discord to fight over the rest of the year: and right now, Kalshi traders give Anthropic the best shot by a wide margin, with its contract trading in the low-to-mid 90s, up from the low 70s a month ago. The company has earned that lead:
- It confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC on June 1, right after closing a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation.
- Its underwriters, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, began scheduling meetings with prospective investors in mid-July, a step that typically arrives a few weeks ahead of a public roadshow.
- Reports point to a possible Nasdaq listing as early as October, built around a reported $47 billion annualized revenue run rate.
Anthropic looks like the frontrunner, but it isn't at the finish line. Investor meetings still have to turn into a roadshow, a roadshow into pricing, and pricing into an actual first day of trading: and none of that happens in a matter of days.
OpenAI Bought Itself More Time
OpenAI's contract keeps sliding, sitting in the teens after another drop this week.
For a while, the company looked like it was racing Anthropic to the public markets on a similar fourth-quarter timeline. That changed in late June, when The New York Times reported that OpenAI is now leaning toward 2027, with CFO Sarah Friar reportedly telling colleagues she'd rather get the company's massive compute commitments and public-company reporting systems in order first.
Friar made that timeline explicit on August 19, telling staff at an all-hands meeting that OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027," while leaving the door open to moving sooner if the business keeps growing at its current pace.
CEO Sam Altman has been just as candid about the number that matters more than the calendar to him: he's reportedly holding out for a valuation of at least $1 trillion before taking OpenAI public, a bar that would put the company in the same weight class as SpaceX's debut.
In the meantime, OpenAI isn't waiting around for liquidity. On August 31, the company completed a roughly $7 billion tender offer letting current and former employees cash out shares at an $852 billion valuation, a sign it can keep rewarding staff without rushing to the Nasdaq.
Discord Keeps Missing Its Own Deadlines
Discord's contract remains choppy, hovering in the low 30s as the company works through its second missed target of the year. It filed confidentially back in January aiming for a March debut, but a SEC review backlog tied to last year's government shutdown pushed that into the back half of 2026.
A fall listing is still plausible on paper, but between the valuation reset and a timeline that keeps slipping, traders aren't in a hurry to bid the odds back up.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Anthropic now looks like a near-lock to close before the year ends; OpenAI and Discord look more like stories that carry into 2027. None of them is likely to make it official in the next couple of weeks, though Anthropic's window is closing fast.
With roughly four months left on the board, and one of the three closing in on a public S-1, "unlikely soon" and "unlikely this year" aren't quite the same thing.
