The long-awaited public listings of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI aren't just big news—they're rewriting the financial history books. According to the latest NCVA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor report released Wednesday, the combined value generated by these three exits will surpass the total from every U.S. venture-backed exit since the year 2000. That's a staggering claim, but the numbers back it up. SpaceX's public debut alone carries a $1.77 trillion valuation, and with Anthropic and OpenAI each projected to hit trillion-dollar marks, the trio could easily exceed $4 trillion. For context, all U.S.-based IPOs last year raised just $70 billion.

Now, a few important caveats. The comparison excludes non-U.S. giants like Alibaba and measures "value created" rather than pure cash. It also misses the impact of innovations that happened inside already-public companies—think the iPhone, Android's launch, or the rise of YouTube and Instagram. Still, the 25-year stretch it's beating is no joke. It includes IPOs from Google (2004), Tesla (2010), and Meta (2012), plus mega-acquisitions of LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp for over $20 billion each. Uber's $84 billion IPO in 2019, once a record-breaker, now looks like pocket change next to SpaceX alone.

What's driving this shift? Companies are staying private longer, meaning today's Google would likely delay its IPO for a bigger payday. More critically, the capital-hungry nature of AI training has forced labs into relentless fundraising cycles, inflating valuations across the board. The scale of these public offerings is pushing financial infrastructure to its limits—and it's a clear signal that the era of trillion-dollar tech exits has only just begun.

Source: TechCrunch