On Friday, SpaceX (SPCX) will join the Nasdaq. “But here’s what matters most to me right now,” says Paradigm’s science-and-tech expert Ray Blanco.

“What comes after June 12?

“When SpaceX prints and the dust settles, capital doesn’t go home. It goes hunting for the next one. The smart money starts asking which private, founder-led company is about to do to its category what SpaceX did to aerospace.

“That’s the question I want to answer today,” Ray says.

“When you go looking for The Next SpaceX, you don’t start with the company. You start with the frontier. Right now, three of them are opening simultaneously.

“Cognition. For the entire history of our species, intelligence has been the scarcest resource on Earth. There were never enough doctors, engineers or researchers. The frontier AI labs are driving the cost of intelligence toward zero.

“Every enterprise on Earth is going to run on AI inference — and the labs are the toll bridges. Hyperscalers and frontier AI companies are spending $700 billion on buildouts this year alone. Existing capacity is sold out.

“Security. Every frontier that opens has to be defended. Ukraine has been the proving ground for what comes next — software-defined warfare, autonomous aircraft, drone swarms, networked sensors.

“The Pentagon is paying attention. The old defense primes build slowly, on government contracts that run decades over schedule and always over budget. The new ones build like SpaceX.

“Distance. Concorde flew its last passengers in 2003. For 22 years, no civilian has crossed the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound. The fastest commercial flight available in 1980 was faster than the fastest one you can buy today.

“That is about to change — and the same physics that gets you from New York to London in three and a half hours gets a hypersonic glide vehicle anywhere on Earth in under sixty minutes.

“Three frontiers. Any one of them could produce the next SpaceX.

Your Rundown for Monday, June 8, 2026...

The Next Generation of Visionaries

“At the leading edge of each frontier,” Ray continues, “you find the same profile: a founder who saw something nobody else wanted to say out loud, and built the company that had to exist.

“OpenAI is the obvious candidate. Sam Altman saw, earlier than almost anyone, that the cost of intelligence was about to collapse — and built the application layer the rest of the field is racing to copy.

“Persistent IPO chatter through 2026 at $300 billion-plus valuations. Revenue running near $20 billion annually.

“Anthropic is the contrarian bet. Dario Amodei left OpenAI because he believed AI safety had to be the central organizing principle of a frontier lab — not an afterthought. He took half the senior research team with him.

“The Claude model family is, by several measures, the leading choice for enterprise coding and research workloads. The company just closed a $30 billion raise.

“An IPO here would be the AI-infrastructure equivalent of SpaceX.

“Anduril is the closest structural match to the SpaceX pattern,” Ray adds. “Palmer Luckey saw what nobody inside the Pentagon wanted to acknowledge — that American defense procurement has been broken for forty years, that the next war won’t be fought with platforms that take two decades and a trillion dollars to field.

“So Luckey built an alternative. Lattice OS. Fury autonomous fighter. Roadrunner interceptor. Arsenal-1 megafactory in Ohio coming online July 2026. Reported $2 billion in revenue, $61 billion private valuation.

“He has said publicly he plans to take the company public. Aviation Week & Space Technology pegs the IPO at 12–24 months out.

“He believes in America, and he builds it.

“Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica is building a Mach 5 commercial and defense aircraft from the ground up — engines, airframe, software, the whole stack. The Air Force is backing him. The Quarterhorse aircraft is meant to fly this decade.

“If it does, every assumption baked into civilian aviation and global military mobility gets rewritten.

“Boom Supersonic is the company that refused to accept humanity peaked at Mach 2 in 1976.

“Blake Scholl’s XB-1 demonstrator broke the sound barrier last year — the first independently developed jet ever to do it. He’s funding the Overture airliner through profits from a side business selling natural gas turbines to data centers – he literally called it ‘our Starlink.’

“United, American, and Japan Airlines hold over $1 billion in pre-orders,” Ray notes.

“Which one is the next SpaceX?

“I’m running each of these through the same filter we once ran SpaceX through: founder-led, vertically integrated, solving a problem the legacy industry declared impossible with a technology moat that takes years to replicate.

“By that filter, Anduril is the closest match today,” Ray says. “The defense procurement crisis is as structural as the launch cost problem SpaceX solved. The moat is real. The revenue is real. The IPO timeline is the most concrete of any name on this list.

“But the honest answer is we don’t know yet which one crosses the finish line first — or which one scales the fastest once it does. Some will IPO this year. Some next year. Some won’t make it.

“The stonecutter at Chartres never saw the Gothic spires. The sea captain who left Palos in 1492 didn’t know he was finding a continent. The kid who watched Armstrong on a black-and-white television in 1969 is probably retired now — but the bootprint is still up there.

“Every one of those moments looked, at the time, like an absurd allocation of capital. And every one of them paid back a thousand times over — not just in money, but in the expansion of the world thereafter.

“We are living in one of those moments right now. The frontiers opening today — cognition, security, distance — are going to redraw the world inside the lifetime of every reader of this letter.

“SpaceX showed what’s possible when a visionary gets the capital and the runway. I’m looking for the next one,” Ray concludes.

Market Rundown for Monday, June 8, 2026

S&P 500 futures are up 0.65% to 7,445.

Oil’s up 1% to $91.48 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is down 0.20% to $4,356.10 per ounce.

And Bitcoin’s up 2.50% to $62,850.