SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI trio to top all US VC exits since 2000

Three companies are about to put more value onto public markets than the last quarter century of US venture-backed exits put together. That is the headline claim in TechCrunch's July 9 analysis of the SpaceX listing and the pending Anthropic and OpenAI offerings, and the math is worth staring at for a moment.

SpaceX has already gone public at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Anthropic and OpenAI are both expected to reach into the trillions when they follow. Russell Brandom, TechCrunch's AI editor, puts the trio somewhere north of $4 trillion, and argues that alone generates more value than all US VC-backed exits since 2000, a stretch that includes Google, Tesla, Meta, and acquisitions the size of LinkedIn, Slack and WhatsApp. For scale, Uber's IPO seemed like a lot of money at $84 billion in 2019, and it comes out to less than 5% of what SpaceX just drummed up.

Why this matters if you do not trade IPOs: the shape of this cycle is unlike anything the public markets are set up for. The SEC counted just $70 billion in US-based IPO proceeds during the previous year, so the plumbing that is about to absorb two more trillion-dollar debuts is coming off a very quiet stretch. Every pension fund, every retirement account, every index-tracking retail holder is about to end up with a much larger AI and space allocation than most of them realize, priced at levels that were set inside private markets where liquidity is a fraction of what it will be on day one of trading.

The honest caveat is that this is framing, not settled fact. Anthropic and OpenAI have not listed yet. The trillions figure attributed to them is expectation, not outcome, and the piece does not lay out how much of that $4 trillion is actually floated versus locked up, how much is fully-diluted paper versus tradeable shares, or what the price does the day retail can genuinely sell it. Take the top-line comparison as directional.

If it holds even directionally, the winners are not just the three names. Late-stage funds, employees sitting on secondaries, the exchanges themselves, and the AI infrastructure names that get repriced in the halo all clear the same tide. The more interesting question is which of the next tier of private AI companies now believe they can wait another five years for a debut on this scale, and which ones give up and take an acquisition instead.