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Venture capital works by turning startup investments into dollars — eventually. It’s not their own money — it’s their investors’ money. And those investors are getting impatient for the payoff. One favourite way to exit is to go public — you do an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of your company’s equity on the stock market. But here’s an analyst note from Kyle Stanford at PitchBook: “Mega IPOs Could Threaten 2026 IPO: Class If these companies go public, is there enough liquidity for the rest of VC?” [_PitchBook_ _, PDF,__archive_] There’s three AI companies with huge valuations who want to go public — OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX, which recently ate xAI. And now VC is expecting these three to IPO — and suck all the money out of the market, leaving the other IPO hopefuls to flounder. OpenAI’s valuation — based on selling a small amount of equity to investors — is 840 billion dollars. Anthropic is valued at only 330 billion. SpaceX is valued at 1.25 trillion dollars. But they’re not trying to offload the whole of the companies onto the stock market — there just isn’t that much money available. Instead: > SpaceX is reported to be aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, and OpenAI and Anthropic could raise another $50 billion combined, which would be roughly as much as was raised by US VC-backed company IPOs over the past decade. These three IPOs alone screw over everyone else who wanted to do a stock market listing: > IPO underwriting would be constrained by the amount these companies are able to raise. US VC-backed IPOs raised a record $62.1 billion in 2021. Alibaba raised a record $22 billion when it was listed in 2014, and was led by six lead underwriters. SpaceX is reportedly looking to raise $50 billion itself, and along with OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s listings, they could together easily push above $100 billion in proceeds. Investors have been pulling out of VC because of an “extended liquidity drought” since 2022. The VCs are wondering out loud if they can ever realise a profit for the investors who gave them the money. These three listings will give the investors their desired payoff — it’ll provide a few actual dollars, but mostly it’ll give them a high valuation of company stock to write in the books. The analyst note talks about “exit value”, which is not quite the same thing as money. This is ignoring that all three companies have terrible cash flows and they’d have to reveal everything about how their awful businesses actually work in their offering documents. This is how the WeWork IPO failed in 2019. But now it’s 2026, and the market is that desperate for a payoff. The deeper problem is: > Some of the slow movement to go public has been due to outside factors, with both policy (tariffs) and geopolitical uncertainty reigning over the past couple of years. That is: the economy is screwed, and then President Trump broke oil. When I was writing my list of reasons for economic disaster, I really did not at all anticipate that Trump would just _break oil_. So there’s not so much actual cash money out there. But there sure are a lot of imaginary assets with a big dollar number attached! * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ ### Share this post: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/20/openai-anthropic-spacex-to-trash-stock-market-ipos-for-2026/