TechCrunch calculated Thursday that the prospective value of planned Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX offerings could exceed the value generated by U.S. venture-backed exits over the previous 25 years. [1] It is a startling comparison. It is also conditional twice over: the offerings are planned, and their values are prospective.
The comparison follows two July 8 warnings about what the market still cannot see. The paper's report on OpenAI and Anthropic racing toward listings behind confidential filings argued that investors were being asked to price enormous offerings before audited books became public. Its analysis of OpenAI's trillion-dollar listing ambition said the proposed valuation had no clearing price and that only a public filing could reconcile losses, revenue, and compute obligations. TechCrunch's new arithmetic does not close those gaps. It shows how much of the exit market may depend on them.
An expected valuation is not a completed public exit. A filing is not a priced offering. A priced offering is not a distribution to every venture fund that has spent years waiting for liquidity. The 25-year comparison measures aggregate prospective value concentrated in three companies; it does not establish realized proceeds, completed valuations, or a reopened path for ordinary portfolio companies.
That difference is the venture industry's distribution problem. A broad exit market lets many funds sell stakes, return capital to limited partners, mark portfolios against public prices, and redirect money toward another generation of companies. Three immense offerings can generate a larger headline total while leaving that machinery narrow. If their shares absorb the available demand for new listings, smaller candidates may still wait. If the offerings succeed without producing comparable appetite elsewhere, the market has celebrated concentration rather than repaired liquidity.
The missing deal structure matters too. How much of each offering would raise primary capital for the company, and how much would provide secondary liquidity to existing holders? Which venture funds own saleable stakes? Which limited partners would receive distributions, and when? The TechCrunch comparison does not answer those questions. Without them, an enormous paper value can coexist with a long queue of funds and founders unable to turn their own holdings into cash.
MSM and venture coverage naturally treat three famous listings as evidence that the exit window is reopening. The X version tends toward two opposite verdicts: proof of unmatched American dynamism or the culminating AI bubble. Neither frame asks who gets through the window. A market can be open for three companies and effectively closed for hundreds of others. The total value alone cannot distinguish those conditions.
The paper's filing rule therefore becomes a market-wide rule. Public money should meet public books, a real offer price, and cash-flow evidence before prospective value is counted as an exit. That standard is not hostility to the three companies. It is how one separates a functioning capital market from three exceptional transactions large enough to disguise the absence of one.
The next receipt is distribution. If smaller companies file, price, and return capital after these offerings, the mega-IPOs may indeed reopen the market. If the three towers rise while ordinary exits remain shut, their scale will have measured the blockage, not repaired it.
-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco