SpaceX and AI giants to eclipse 25 years of US tech exits

SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and space transportation company, has just gone public, and OpenAI, the AI research lab, and Anthropic, the AI safety and research company, are both nearing IPOs of their own. A new report from NCVA-Pitchbook, a venture capital research firm, released Wednesday puts a number on just how large that combined wave of listings is. Taking stock of the pending offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, the report states: “Along with the SpaceX IPO, these exits will generate more value than all U.S. VC-backed exits since 2000.” A VC-backed exit — when a venture-funded startup is acquired or goes public — is the standard way the industry measures value created, and this report says three companies are about to outdo a quarter-century of them combined.

The numbers back up the claim. SpaceX has already gone public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and with Anthropic and OpenAI both pushing toward listings of their own, it’s likely the trio together will land somewhere north of $4 trillion combined. That figure dwarfs the $70 billion in U.S.-based IPO proceeds that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. financial regulator, counted for all of last year, underscoring how concentrated this wave of value creation has become. It also helps explain why a report tracking venture activity would reach so far back for a comparison: no single stretch of IPO activity in recent memory comes close to matching what these three companies are about to do together.

That scale puts the last 25 years of tech exits — the period the NCVA-Pitchbook report uses as its baseline — in perspective:

• Google went public in 2004, Tesla in 2010, and Meta in 2012, three IPOs that produced some of the most valuable companies in the world.
• LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp were each acquired for more than $20 billion during that same 25-year span.
• Uber’s $84 billion IPO in 2019 looked enormous at the time; its valuation amounts to less than 5% of SpaceX’s current $1.77 trillion valuation.

Even measured against companies that reshaped entire industries, the gap is stark: a single valuation from this year’s IPO wave already outweighs the era’s other marquee exits combined.

Why it matters

The unprecedented scale of these valuations signals a massive concentration of wealth in aerospace and AI, testing the limits of public market liquidity and financial infrastructure.