Tomorrow, SpaceX is set to list on the Nasdaq at a fixed $135 a share, selling 555.6 million shares for a $75 billion raise at a $1.77 trillion valuation — the largest public offering in history.
Meanwhile, Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 at a $965 billion valuation, and OpenAI followed on June 8, eyeing a fall listing. After four years of a venture liquidity drought, the read across the industry is simple: the IPO window is finally open again.
I would be careful with that read.
Look at where the money is coming from. SpaceX’s raise alone is slated to be more than the $47.4 billion the entire U.S. IPO market raised in 2025.
Bloomberg reported last week that with brokerage cash balances low, retail investors may have to sell existing holdings to fund their SpaceX orders, with Tesla and Bitcoin the most likely sources, and SpaceX is reserving as much as 30% of the deal, roughly $22.5 billion, for that same risk-on crowd. Crypto’s own IPO pipeline stalled this year as capital rotated toward AI. These three companies could very well be the entire 2026 IPO class.
Put together, this points to a concentration event rather than a broad reopening. A small number of funds and pre-IPO sellers get liquidity, three tickers absorb the available capital and attention, and the rest of the queue waits. If you run an early-stage company, the window reopening for SpaceX does very little for you directly.
The acquisition outlook
What these listings do change is more durable, and it runs through M&A.
A public SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic become some of the best-capitalized acquirers on the planet, with liquid stock to spend. OpenAI has already closed roughly half a dozen acquisitions this year, nearly matching its full 2025 total, and AI dealmaking across the market rose about 90% year over year in the first quarter. The vast majority of venture exits have always been acquisitions; these offerings deepen the pool of buyers far more than they shorten the IPO queue.
For founders, that reframes the goal. Don’t build for an IPO window that was only ever open to a handful of companies. Build to be the company a newly public AI giant needs to own: real ownership of a workflow, proprietary data that compounds, the testing and evaluation infrastructure these labs increasingly run on, or a wedge into a market one of these platforms wants to enter. At the seed stage, the exit math has always pointed toward a single meaningful acquisition, and this wave widens the set of acquirers who can write that check.
For investors, the discipline is to not mistake a concentration event for a market that has reopened. The liquidity — and the distributions LPs have spent four years waiting on — will land with a narrow set of names. Most portfolios still get liquid the way they always have, through M&A, and the health of that market matters more to the median fund than whether SpaceX trades up on day one.
The test comes this fall. If the retail bid holds and the next tier of the queue prices well, Friday really will be the start of a broad reopening. Watch those follow-on listings, and watch what three newly public companies do with their stock over the next year. That second part is what reaches the rest of the market.
As the co-founder and managing partner of MGV, Marc Schröder is committed to establishing MGV as the premier venture firm for world-class tech entrepreneurs to accelerate their visions. Under Schröder’s stewardship, MGV has swiftly ascended to a top-quartile firm, surpassing the performance of 95% of venture funds. The performance of MGV is driven by Schröder’s unique approach to venture investing — that providing intensive sales training, devising robust fundraising strategies and securing follow-on investments is the best way to support founders and drive the deepest return for investors. Business Insider has recognized him as one of the Top 100 global seed investors, and his perspectives are published regularly in Crunchbase News and other leading publications.
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Related reading:
- The SpaceX IPO Filing Looks Nothing Like Those Of The Elite Group Of Tech Giants It’s Hoping To Join
- SpaceX IPO At $1.5T Valuation Would Be 10x Larger Than Biggest VC-Backed Listing Of All Time
Illustration: Dom Guzman
