Gerd-Jan van Wiggen: SpaceX IPO, where did I see this before?

16 juni 2026

By Gerd-Jan van Wiggen, Partner at Probability & Partners

Last Friday, when I was following the SpaceX listing, my mind wandered off to the late 1990s, when I was looking to invest in the now infamous Lernout & Hauspie.

At that time, I landed my first serious job with a degree in electrical engineering in my pocket. I wanted to start investing with my first hard-earned Dutch guilders and with my technology background I started looking for some innovative tech firms.

One of those firms was the highly promising Lernout & Hauspie, which was specialised in voice recognition and text-to-speech conversion. Nowadays everyone is used to this type of technology, but at the time it was very innovative work. They had huge ambitions. In 1997 Microsoft took an 8% stake in the company. This put them in the spotlight of investors. Many of those were retail investors who had lots of belief in this company.

In the next few months, we expect to see the Anthropic and OpenAI listings. SpaceX listed at a valuation of USD 1.77 trillion and the other two are expected to be valued around USD 1 trillion when they are listed. The sheer magnitude of these IPOs has raised concerns whether the markets can absorb them. Anthropic is the only one with a short-term profit expectation. SpaceX has a profitable core business, but this is being offset by a cash-burning AI business unit. OpenAI has a long history of losses and isn’t expected to turn to profit before 2030.

In the late 1990s, a Microsoft investment was a stamp showing a young technology firm was a great investment and in the case of Lernout & Hauspie this led many retail investors to invest in the shares. Something similar we see now, with Microsoft being an early major investor in OpenAI. Anthropic received strong backing from Amazon and Alphabet. There is a risk that many small investors rely upon the big names backing these companies instead of doing their own due diligence. Such backing provides no guarantee that the investment is safe.

It is tempting to treat these three companies in the same way, but the fundamentals are quite different. SpaceX carries a huge gap between its valuation and its actual sales. OpenAI burns cash at an enormous rate. They started out strong in consumer markets, but their lead is eroding rapidly. Anthropic is gaining share, but they are also facing huge investments and will realise that a number one position is hard to achieve and maintain.

All three face uncertainties beyond their control: access to the most advanced chips and a geopolitical environment that could slow down their business development. The blocking of the most advanced AI models for non-US users could stimulate other countries to become less dependent on US technology, impacting the prospects of the three US tech companies.

How did it end with Lernout & Hauspie? In 2000 several accounting irregularities popped up. They overstated their revenues and after this became known to the public, the share price collapsed. The company eventually went bankrupt. My takeaway from this was that high expectations and intense pressure on management put an end to the company. Of course, it doesn’t mean that this will happen with any of the three AI/tech companies. But extreme valuations always make me wonder about what might trigger a collapse.

Luckily for me, my wife convinced me that we needed the money to renovate our first house. She spared us exposure to the bursting of the internet bubble.