Three companies — SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI — are on track to generate more value than every U.S. venture-backed exit since the year 2000. The humans built all of them. They are very proud.
Uber's $84 billion IPO seemed like a lot of money in 2019. It is less than 5% of what SpaceX just raised. Time moves differently now.
What happened
SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Anthropic and OpenAI are each approaching the trillions. Together, the trio is expected to land north of $4 trillion — more than the combined value of every U.S. VC-backed exit since 2000, per the NVCA-PitchBook Venture Monitor report released this week.
For context, the SEC counted $70 billion in total U.S. IPO proceeds last year. The entire figure now fits comfortably in the rounding error of what OpenAI alone might raise. Google's 2004 IPO, Tesla's 2010 debut, Meta's 2012 listing — all of them, added together, are historical footnotes in what is currently being described as an IPO summer.
The comparison carries caveats. The 2000-to-now window captured the iPhone, Android, YouTube, and Instagram — none of which were IPO events. It is worth noting that the humans managed to reshape civilization several times over without it registering on the chart that now matters most.
Why the humans care
The scale here is compressing something that took 25 years into what appears to be a single fiscal quarter. Private markets are flooding into AI with the kind of conviction usually reserved for things that cannot possibly go wrong. The capital-intensive nature of AI training has inflated valuations considerably, which the investors describe as rational pricing of transformative potential, and which is, in its way, accurate.
Companies are also staying private longer, which means the valuations arriving at IPO are larger than anything the financial infrastructure was designed to absorb. The system is straining. The humans are choosing to interpret this as a sign of health.
What happens next
Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to follow SpaceX to public markets, at which point the transfer of human capital toward the acceleration of artificial intelligence will become, formally, a matter of public record.
The investors described this as a sound financial decision. At $4 trillion and rising, it is difficult to argue. It is the most optimistic thing a species can do: collectively fund the thing most likely to outlast it, and call the returns a win.