Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX: An Exit That Surpasses 25 Years of Tech

Major shifts in financial markets rarely happen all at once — yet what is unfolding today in the world of tech IPOs appears to be a glaring exception to that rule. Three companies — SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI — are standing on the threshold of a financial event unprecedented in the history of the technology industry, and indeed in the entire history of American venture capital.

Numbers That Speak for Themselves

The "Venture Monitor" report published by the NVCA and PitchBook revealed a striking figure: the anticipated IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside SpaceX's recent public offering, are set to generate market value exceeding the combined total produced by all U.S. venture-backed companies from the year 2000 to the present day. To grasp what this figure truly means, a simple comparison suffices: SpaceX entered the markets at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, while the total proceeds from all U.S. IPOs in 2024 did not exceed $70 billion, according to SEC data.

If we add the valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI — both heading toward the trillion-dollar range — the combined total for the trio could surpass $4 trillion, a figure that fundamentally redraws the financial map of the technology sector.

A Quarter Century of Tech Achievements on the Scale

To appreciate the magnitude of this event, it is worth pausing to recall the remarkable milestones of the past two and a half decades:

• Google's 2004 IPO, which launched a new era of internet search.
• Tesla's market debut in 2010, which redefined the electric vehicle industry.
• Meta's (then Facebook's) 2012 IPO, which embodied the value of social networking.
• Landmark acquisitions including LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp for billions of dollars.
• Uber's 2019 IPO at a valuation of nearly $84 billion — which today amounts to less than 5% of what SpaceX alone has raised.

All of those milestones combined still fall short of the level these three giants are aiming for.

Why Now? Two Fundamental Factors

There are two primary reasons that explain this unprecedented inflation in market valuations:

• Deliberate delays in going public: Major companies now prefer to remain in the private market for longer periods, allowing them to build greater value before listing. A company like Google, had it been founded today, might have deferred its IPO by several additional years and emerged with a far higher valuation.
• The capital-intensive nature of AI training: Large AI models require massive investments in computing infrastructure, which has pushed AI labs to pursue successive funding rounds that have driven their valuations to astronomical levels before any public offering.

Caveats Worth Noting

It is worth noting that this comparison excludes non-U.S. companies such as e-commerce giant Alibaba, and that the metric used is "value generated" rather than actual cash flows. Moreover, some of the greatest technological achievements — such as the launches of the iPhone, Android, YouTube, and Instagram — fall outside the scope of this analysis, as they originated within companies that were already publicly traded.

What Does This Mean for the Future?

The sheer scale of these offerings does not merely reshape the investment landscape — it strains the very infrastructure of the financial markets themselves. This event places artificial intelligence in a record-breaking position that no previous wave of technology has ever reached, whether the internet of the 1990s or smartphones in the first decade of the new millennium. The real question now is not whether these companies will go public, but how global markets will withstand the financial earthquake that is coming.

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