For decades, technology companies went public and then spent years compounding into giants. The AI era is flipping that script. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) already entered public markets at a $2 trillion valuation, while Anthropic and OpenAI are approaching potential valuations that could push the trio above $5 trillion, noted Jason Calacanis, co-host and producer of the popular All-In Podcast.
That’s a scale that makes decades of tech IPOs look surprisingly small.
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$5 Trillion Before The Finish Line
The comparison is almost hard to process.
SpaceX began trading in June at roughly a $2 trillion valuation. Anthropic’s investors are expecting the AI company to reach a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public, while OpenAI has been discussing a new funding round at about a $1.2 trillion valuation ahead of a potential listing.
Together, that puts the three companies at more than $5 trillion based on those current or prospective valuations.
Now compare that with the entire U.S. technology IPO market from 1980 through 2025.
According to data compiled by University of Florida professor Jay Ritter and cited by the Financial Times, 3,365 technology companies that went public during that 45-year period had a combined value of $4.1 trillion when they began trading.
The comparison isn’t perfectly apples-to-apples. The historical figure is measured at IPO, while Anthropic and OpenAI’s numbers are prospective valuations. It also doesn’t adjust the older figure for inflation. But the scale is still striking.
Private Markets Got There First
There is another important shift underneath the headline.
The biggest technology companies of the past often created enormous value after going public. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) are obvious examples: public investors participated as those companies expanded into some of the world’s most valuable businesses.
AI companies are reaching extraordinary valuations while still private.
The Financial Times estimates that private U.S. unicorns are collectively valued at about $5.3 trillion based on their latest funding rounds. That creates a very different starting point for public investors: instead of discovering a promising company early in its public life, they may be buying into businesses that have already accumulated enormous private-market valuations.
That doesn’t mean the public-market opportunity is over. It means the starting line has moved.
The IPO Market Is Changing
SpaceX has already shown that Wall Street can absorb a mega-IPO of this scale. Axios reported SpaceX’s early investor outreach helped establish a playbook that could be replicated by Anthropic and OpenAI.
But the bigger question is what happens beyond these three companies.
If AI keeps producing companies capable of reaching trillion-dollar valuations before going public, the traditional IPO pipeline could become increasingly polarized: a small number of enormous listings commanding enormous attention, alongside a much larger pool of startups that struggle to reach public markets.
Why it Matters
The headline isn’t simply that SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are worth trillions.
It is that the AI boom is changing when investors get access to technology’s biggest companies. For public-market investors, the next generation of mega-cap tech may arrive much later in the growth story — and at a dramatically larger scale.
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This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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