AI bubble fears spread through global markets on Wednesday, the same day SpaceX moved to price history's largest stock-market debut, a roughly $75 billion raise.
Key Points:
- Software stocks have shed close to $2 trillion since late 2025, with traders calling the slide the "SaaSpocalypse."
- SpaceX is set to trade Jun. 12 on the Nasdaq at $135 a share, raising roughly $75 billion.
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill forcing banks to reveal their exposure to AI firms.
Software Stocks Lead The Retreat
Wall Street has spent 2026 living through a rolling software selloff that traders at Jefferies nicknamed the "SaaSpocalypse." By some counts, the rout has erased close to $2 trillion from the S&P software index since its late-2025 peak.
The worry is concrete.
Investors fear that AI agents capable of doing the work of entire sales teams will leave companies needing far fewer software licenses, weakening the per-seat model that built the industry.
Apollo has turned that fear into policy, screening deals for AI-displacement risk and holding no software in its private-equity book. The firm keeps software below 2% of its assets, citing a sector that swelled from a tenth of buyout volume to roughly 40% at the peak.
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Warren And KKR Flag Systemic Risk
Stocks in Hong Kong and mainland China fell on Wednesday, with technology names among the hardest hit. In Washington, Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill that would force banks to disclose their exposure to chipmakers, data centers and hyperscalers.
The alarm has reached Wall Street's own ranks.
Henry McVey, the top macro strategist at KKR, struck a similar note. He told clients the boom is real but will make the economy more extreme than anything seen since the industrial revolution of the 1870s.
Hyperscaler infrastructure spending is nearing $660 billion this year, the largest corporate investment program outside wartime, and increasingly funded by debt.
SpaceX sits at the center of the test. The company is set to debut on the Nasdaq on Jun. 12 under the ticker SPCX, after pricing shares at $135 to raise about $75 billion.
That listing caps a two-year run in which AI optimism carried global indexes to records, lifting the market's cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio near 38, above its dot-com peak. SpaceX sells rockets, not AI, yet its arrival, and the OpenAI and Anthropic offerings lining up behind it, will read as a referendum on whether investors still believe.
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