SpaceX’s IPO may be a real win for venture, but it’s a deeply skewed win.
“It’s a huge win for VC firms,” Kyle Stanford, PitchBook director of U.S. venture capital research, told me on Friday. “It’s a concentrated win, but the sentiment is that everyone can say: ‘VC is still creating these returns.’ Now, you have something where you can say that IPOs are on their way back. Because if SpaceX does great, we have some momentum.”
SpaceX did, in fact, do great. The company’s shares closed on its first day of trading up 19%, sending the its valuation above $2 trillion in a genuinely historic IPO. What happens next will be telling—OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing each other to public debuts that are looking increasingly inevitable.
“If OpenAI and Anthropic go out, maybe we have some companies starting to build a pipeline for an IPO in early 2027—regular unicorns, between $10 and $20 billion,” said Stanford. “That could be a big narrative.”
That narrative is key, because that narrative is hope for the overall venture market, which mostly won’t see a dime of SpaceX returns. In fact, an extraordinarily limited number of VCs are set for a major SpaceX return.
