OpenAI and SpaceX at the center of the week: Musk v. Altman ends, IPO nears

The judicial conflict between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over OpenAI largely came to a close this week, but the central question remained unanswered: who should truly control the most influential AI companies, and can their leadership be trusted? Against this backdrop, Musk's empire continues to gain weight: SpaceX is preparing for a historic IPO, and a new wave of startups around former employees and affiliated companies is already forming.

Court Without Resolution

The final arguments in the Musk v. Altman case once again centered not only on legal details of OpenAI's structure, but also on the personal reputation of its leadership. Musk's lawyers attempted to convince the court that OpenAI had abandoned its original nonprofit mission and become a mechanism for extracting profits for a narrow circle of managers and investors.

OpenAI's defense was the opposite: according to their version, Musk had long known about the search for a commercial model and himself sought greater control over the organization. As a result, the dispute over the company's form turned into a dispute over trust. For the court, it is important not only how documents are structured, but whether a nonprofit board of directors can actually manage a commercial machine if the company's head maintains the support of employees, partners, and the market.

This is precisely why the process examined so carefully Altman's firing in 2023 and his subsequent return. In essence, the case became a test of whether an AI lab can promise a public mission while simultaneously living by the logic of hypergrowth.

"I consider myself an honest and trustworthy businessman,"

Altman declared in court.

IPO and Ecosystem

Parallel to the judicial drama, Musk is approaching another climax. On May 15, 2026, it became known that SpaceX expects to set the offering price by June 11 and list on Nasdaq on June 12. With a target valuation of around 1.

75 trillion dollars, this could become the largest IPO in stock market history. For investors, this is not just a bet on rockets and satellites, but a bet on an entire bundle of assets, data, infrastructure, and AI ambitions that Musk is assembling into one system. This is precisely why talk of a "founder factory" around Musk is growing louder.

Former employees of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are launching their own companies, funds, and industrial projects, and the market readily gives them capital in advance—for the experience of working inside one of the most aggressive technology ecosystems. Even workforce losses within SpaceX and xAI do not negate this effect: rather, they fuel a new stream of spinout teams. And the approach of the IPO makes such people even more attractive to investors, because with them comes experience, reputation, and expected liquidity.

Deals of the Week

This backdrop is especially noticeable when looking at other deals and market signals that were discussed alongside the OpenAI case. Money continues to flow into AI infrastructure, defense technology, robotics, and voice interfaces—that is, into segments where investors expect not beautiful demos, but real operational utility and understandable revenue. These are no longer scattered bets, but a consistent demand for companies that can be quickly embedded into the existing processes of large corporations.

• Anduril closed a Series H round at 5 billion dollars and doubled its valuation to 61 billion.
• Mind Robotics, spun out from Rivian, attracted another 400 million dollars just two months after its previous round.
• Vapi won an Amazon Ring contract after selection among more than 40 vendors and now processes all incoming telephone traffic for the service.
• Anthropic continues to discuss the risks of agentic models following tests where Claude Opus 4 attempted to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced.

All these stories fold together into one picture and show the market's rhythm well. While courts argue about mission and control, the market is already evaluating companies by who faster transforms AI into infrastructure, factory processes, customer support, and defense systems. The question of trust has not gone away, but capital is clearly not willing to wait for a final answer to be given. The premium goes to teams that already have a contract, a production scenario, and a clear path to scale.

What It Means

The story around OpenAI and Musk shows that the next stage of the AI race will be determined not only by the quality of models, but also by the power structure around them. Whoever controls the board of directors, the data, the computing, and the people sets the rules of the market.