A Trillion-Dollar Trio: How SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic Are Rewriting VC History

The IPO market has been buzzing all summer, but a fresh report from the NCVA-PitchBook Venture Monitor puts the moment in staggering perspective. Three companies - SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic - are on track to generate more shareholder value than every U.S. venture-backed exit combined over the past quarter-century. That's not hyperbole; that's the data.

SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and with OpenAI and Anthropic both expected to land in the trillions, the trio could collectively top $4 trillion. For context, the SEC recorded just $70 billion in total U.S. IPO proceeds last year. The report's authors are careful to note that this comparison excludes foreign giants like Alibaba and measures "value created" rather than liquid cash. It also doesn't capture the billions generated by companies that went public earlier - think Google in 2004, Tesla in 2010, or Meta in 2012 - or blockbuster acquisitions like LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp.

What's changed? Companies are staying private longer, allowing valuations to balloon before they hit public markets. And AI's insatiable need for compute power has forced labs into massive fundraising rounds, inflating their worth. The result is a financial infrastructure straining to handle the sheer size of these offerings. Uber's $84 billion IPO in 2019 once seemed colossal; it's now less than 5% of what SpaceX alone just raised. The numbers are rewriting the rules of the game.

Source: TechCrunch