SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI: Trio tops 25 years of exits

SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, and Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing into the trillions, a combination the NCVA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor says will “generate more value than all U.S. VC-backed exits since 2000.” Together the three companies are likely to land somewhere north of $4 trillion, a scale that dwarfs recent IPO proceeds.

How do these IPOs compare to the last 25 years of tech exits?

Taken at face value, the combined public valuations from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI exceed the cumulative value of U.S. venture-backed exits since 2000, according to NCVA-Pitchbook. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission counted just $70 billion in U.S.-based IPO proceeds last year, and individual high-profile exits like Uber’s $84 billion IPO look small beside trillion-dollar listings.

That 25-year span included major public debuts such as Google in 2004, Tesla in 2010, and Meta in 2012, and large private exits such as LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp, each acquired for more than $20 billion. The report’s headline comparison measures "value created" rather than strictly liquid cash, which helps explain how a trio of modern AI and aerospace listings can eclipse two and a half decades of VC exits.

Why are AI-related valuations and these IPOs so large?

Two concrete drivers pushed the numbers up: companies are staying private longer, and AI training is capital-intensive, which has driven intense fundraising and higher valuations for labs. Major product and platform breakthroughs that once arrived after IPO—examples include the iPhone, Android, YouTube, and Instagram—often happened at public companies, but today those kinds of platform-scale events are being financed while firms remain private.

Longer private lives let startups raise more capital at higher valuations before listing. The specific nature of modern AI work, with huge compute and data costs, amplifies that effect: labs raise large rounds to fund training and infrastructure, which inflates private valuations and sets a higher public price floor when they list.

Why it matters

The concentration of value into a handful of massive public offerings changes how capital, talent, and regulatory attention flow across the industry. If the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI listings together do exceed the last 25 years of U.S. VC-backed exits, financial infrastructure and public markets will face unprecedented pressure to absorb and price extreme, AI-driven valuations. That shift reshapes where returns accrue, who captures liquidity events, and how investors and policymakers evaluate systemic exposure to a small number of outsized firms.

What to watch

Watch the actual IPOs and the numbers they settle at: the report flags the trio as collectively topping 25 years of exits, but the precise public valuations for Anthropic and OpenAI will determine whether the combined total clears the implied $4 trillion threshold. Also track how public market trading and regulatory scrutiny respond to mega-valuations in AI and aerospace.

Specific figures cited in the public discussion include SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion valuation, the NCVA-Pitchbook comment that these exits will “generate more value than all U.S. VC-backed exits since 2000,” the SEC’s $70 billion figure for U.S.-based IPO proceeds last year, and Uber’s $84 billion IPO as a recent benchmark that now looks relatively small.