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Remember the dotcom bubble? At the 1999 peak, 388 US companies went public, raising $57bn. A generation later it remains a tech-financial cultural touchstone, with the number of floats never getting near that level since.
However, the post-Covid market mania helped 251 companies go public in 2021, and the likes of Rivian, Roblox, Warby Parker, Bumble and Robinhood raised a record $115bn — almost twice the money raised in the peak dotcom bubble year.
But even that is about to be shattered if Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei get their way. Take a look at this:
The chart is from Goldman Sachs’ latest estimates for US equity demand and supply, where the bank lifted its forecasts for the amount to be raised by US IPOs in 2026 from $160bn to $225bn.
SpaceX alone is expected to raise about $75bn when it goes public later this month. That wouldn’t just be the most raised by an IPO ever, it would be more than raised by ALL the floats of 1999 combined.
Throw in OpenAI’s mooted $60bn IPO and these two companies alone will raise more money than all the dotcom listings put together, even before you get to the likes of Anthropic, Shein, Databricks and potentially Stripe — and a massive host of private equity-backed companies that buyout funds are desperate to offload.
Sure, many of these companies are only listing a small sliver of their equity — SpaceX’s $75bn would represent less than 5 per cent of the $1.75tn IPO valuation that Musk has slapped on the company — but don’t forget that many early employees and investors will be allowed to sell shares in the coming months and years.
Staggered lockups will drag this overhang into 2027, but Goldman’s analysts estimate that company that list less than 10 per cent of their shares on an IPO see their free-floats gradually increase to 28 per cent after six months — and 46 per cent a year after the IPO. Therefore:
Based on the historical pattern, we estimate that recent and upcoming IPOs will result in roughly $500 billion of additional unlocked shares available to sell in 2026 and likely a larger quantity in 2027.
Or in chart terms:
This has understandably led to fears that the market could suffer severe indigestion. Even one of these big IPOs could be enough to cause a mild case, but the combination could prove painful. That big IPO years tend to presage big downturns has exacerbated those concerns.
If you include normal follow-ons, convertible bonds being converted, and “special purpose acquisition companies” — yes, they’ve made a comeback — then Goldman estimates that corporate equity issuance will total $675bn this year. And that’s before you have supply from investor lockups expiring.
In other words, if we’ve read Goldman’s report correctly then its analysts are predicting total US equity supply of $1.175tn in 2026, consisting of $225bn of IPOs, $450bn of other corporate stock sales, and another $500bn gradually dribbling out from corporate executives and early investors in the IPOs.
At the same time, the AI data centre spending splurge is weighing on corporate buybacks, which has been the single biggest pillar for equity demand over the past decade-plus.
However, Goldman’s analysts are reasonably relaxed about this — at least for now.
They estimate that US companies will still buy back a healthy $1.3tn of stock this year. There’s also a healthy outlook for M&A, which is another big source of demand, and foreign investors seemingly cannot get enough of US equities at the moment, and will probably turn up in size for many of the big flagship IPOs in particular. Nor is supply wildly out of whack with the long-term average.
As a result, they reckon that there will still narrowly be more demand than supply in 2026:
Perhaps. This optimistic take seems pretty predicated on the market remaining blissfully buoyant. Both buybacks, M&A and foreign purchases of US stocks tend to dry up pretty quickly if there are any setbacks.
Then there are idiosyncratic risks to Goldman’s forecasts. For example, if the SpaceX IPO belly flops then the wider reverberations could be severe, given its sheer size and the number of big investors that need it to go well.
But that may be tricky for the bank’s analysts to say, given that Goldman snagged the coveted IPO’s lead-left position . . .
