How to invest in SpaceX and Claude before anyone else
People love a chance to jump ahead of the queue, especially when it’s an exclusive club everyone is trying to be a part of.
The joy of strolling up to the front with a casually knowing nod while others crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the room they’re waiting to go into is somewhat akin to investing in a company before it floats on the stock exchange.
A lot of big names are reported to be teeing up stock market listings in 2026 and there's a way UK investors can invest in them ahead of time. The answer lies in UK-listed investment trusts. This article will explain more and look at the details of the potential IPO surge.
Companies are often priced to ‘pop’ higher when they list, albeit not always successfully, which increases the appeal of getting in early. Some of the names expected to list in the coming months include SpaceX and AI heavyweights Anthropic, owner of the Claude AI chatbot, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
With most of the big businesses planning to join the stock market in 2026 set to debut in the US it is important to note that, even if these IPOs are opened up to the general public rather than just big institutions, UK investors will be prevented from participating by US market rules and will have to wait until the shares are listed before they can trade them.
To infinity and beyond
Anthropic and OpenAI are more in the rumour mill phase but SpaceX is widely expected to list sometime this year based on declarations from its founder, CEO and chief engineer, Elon Musk.
Musk has publicly aimed for a 2026 IPO, with June pegged as the most likely date after reports that he wanted the event to coincide with a rare planetary alignment (8-9 June) and his birthday a few weeks later (28 June).
SpaceX launched back in 2002 and quickly has rocketed up to become one of the most highly prized companies in the world. At the end of last year, it was reported that SpaceX would be looking to raise $50 billion when it came to market, in a listing which would value it at $1.5 trillion. Subsequently SpaceX announced plans for a $1.25 trillion merger between SpaceX and the owner of social media platform X and AI tool Grok and fellow member of the Musk stable: xAI.
SpaceX’s reported plans would put it ahead of the biggest public float on record, which was set back in 2019 when state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco debuted on the Saudi Stock Exchange with a $1.7 trillion valuation.
If SpaceX does achieve a $1.5 trillion valuation, it’ll rank as the eighth biggest public company in developed markets on the day it lists, coming in behind chip-giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company ($1.9 trillion) and ahead of Musk’s other big venture, Tesla ($1.4 trillion).
It makes sense then that fund managers are expecting the event to be one of the big investment wins of 2026, according to a recent industry survey by Winterflood Securities, a London based broker which puts out dedicated investment trust research.
Polling wealth managers, investment trust directors and institutional investors on which trust they thought would deliver the highest returns this year, a standout collection of names from a mixed set of responses were those invested in SpaceX.
Anthropic scored a $350 billion valuation following a recent funding round. This coincided with the sell-off in data and software firms after the latest iterations of the firm’s AI tools raised the prospect of it moving from a provider to a competitor of this subset of the market.
What is an IPO and why do companies do it?
An IPO is the moment that a company goes from being privately owned to being publicly available on the stock market. This is often done to access more liquidity by allowing investors to back the business. But it was also historically seen as a sign that a company had ‘made it’, giving it increased legitimacy.
There is a trade-off. When companies list they put themselves up for more scrutiny as we’re all able to see how much money it’s made, how much executives are being paid and the overall internal workings of the business, for good and for bad.
This, plus increased market volatility, has contributed to the trend of companies opting to stay private for longer, with the average age at which a company goes public increasing from 6.9 years in 2014 to 10.7 years in 2024, according to data from Morningstar.
But there has always been a pros and cons list for being either public or private. Importantly for retail investors, they don't have to wait for a company to make the leap to capitalise on the returns experienced before and potentially at the point of its stock market debut.
Which trusts own the big names?
In the case of SpaceX, some of the UK’s biggest investment trusts are already in the space race. Edinburgh based asset management group Baillie Gifford boasts four investment trusts already invested in SpaceX: Scottish Mortgage, Edinburgh Worldwide, Baillie Gifford US Growth and Schiehallion; along with London-based RIT Capital Partners.
Out of the five, Scottish Mortgage has the biggest exposure to SpaceX in the UK, with a 15.1% allocation.
The £14.7 billion trust first invested in SpaceX back in 2018, aided by the managers’ pre-existing relationship with Musk, having been early backers of Tesla.
Schiehallion is the only name which invests purely in private firms, focused on ‘late stage’ companies, i.e. stocks which are in theory about to IPO. The rest hold a blend of public and private equities.
The table shows a broader list of potential upcoming IPOs, where the companies are held by UK-listed trusts.
Trusts are well-suited to accessing private investments because their closed-ended structure means that they are not at risk of having to undergo forced selling to meet liquidity needs like open-ended funds do.
IPOs don’t always perform well
A new stock market listing is far from being guaranteed to be successful. The ‘buy-now-pay-later' firm Klarna was one of the most highly anticipated IPOs last year, so much so that it felt confident enough to set its stock price above what financial analysts had expected.
Chrysalis, run and founded by well-known managers Richard Watts and Nick Williamson – who set up the company after long careers at asset management firm Jupiter – had been one of those keenly looking forward to Klarna’s debut, having first invested back in 2019.
However, things didn’t go to plan as Klarna’s shares rapidly surrendered their initial gains to trade sharply lower, which hurt Chrysalis.
A similarly disappointing IPO came when delivery firm Deliveroo listed in London to much hype in 2021 but quickly fell flat when its share price sank as much as 31% in intraday trading on its debut.
2026 is expected to provide several IPOs for the record books, and investment trusts allow investors to get behind the velvet rope on some of these businesses now. However, it is important to remember that IPOs can fail as well as succeed and investing through trusts means you are also exposed to the other holdings in the portfolio.
This means that even if there was a big uplift from a successful IPO for a holding in one of these trusts, this would be diluted by all of the other investments in the portfolio.
Eve Maddock-Jones: Funds and Investment Trust Writer
Eve joined AJ Bell in 2026 as a funds and investment trust writer. She was previously editor at Investment Week, reporting on all major retail investor news, covering funds and investment trusts, ETFs and regulation...
