The SpaceX IPO marks a lopsided win for venture

SpaceX shares closed on its first day of trading up 19%, sending the company's valuation above $2 trillion in a genuinely historic IPO. What happens next will be telling.

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. 

“If you look at SpaceX’s full cap table that we have, it’s not a bunch of emerging managers or mid-tier VCs,” said PitchBook’s Stanford. “It’s the best, and then all the other major asset managers in the world.”

So, venture, in its way, is looking more bifurcated than ever. Read my full story here to see who the biggest SpaceX investor winners are—and why Hot IPO Summer will likely be an unreachable benchmark for the rest of the century. 

As Stanford pointed out, should 2026 be when SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all go public: “Will something like this ever happen again? A trillion‑dollar IPO, let alone three in a year? The answer is probably no.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com