When ride-hailing app Uber listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, it reset the scales for all venture capitalists. In one of the all-time largest initial public offerings in the United States, the company raised $8.1 billion on a $82 billion valuation.

Early backers like venture fund Benchmark, Google Ventures and Lowercase Capital held stakes worth over $12 billion at the time of the float. But the numbers for that deal — one of the best of the last era of startups — now look quaint.

That’s because the valuation of just three startups, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, have exploded over the last year. Elon’s space giant is now tipped to go public at a valuation of over $1.5 trillion as soon as June following its merger with xAI in February, which valued the combined business at $1.25 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are now valued at $852 billion and $380 billion respectively, with Anthropic reportedly in talks to at least match its archrival’s valuation in a new fundraise.

Pitchbook data shows that $1.58 trillion was generated in total from all the stock market listings, takeovers and mergers in the United States over the last five years (with 2021’s listing and SPAC bonanza driving over half of that number). The SpaceX’s market cap alone could eclipse this (but is reported to plan to float only around 5% of its equity).

Anthropic could go public at the nearly $1 trillion valuation its shares currently trade at on Forge Global, a platform that enables sales of private startup stakes. OpenAI trades at around $900 billion on Forge. Public listings for Anthropic and OpenAI at that price would mean that the headline valuation of just three deals would outstrip the $2.64 trillion generated from a decade of exits stretching back to 2016, including some of biggest ever from the likes of Coinbase (IPOed at $86 billion in April 2021), Airbnb (IPOed at $79 billion in December 2020) and DoorDash (IPOed at $71 billion in December 2020) and........

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