Anthropic is having a moment in the private markets; SpaceX could spoil the party

Glen Anderson has been trading private company shares since 2010, when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today there are thousands, he says.

As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses exclusively on the private securities markets and facilitates trades in about a thousand stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly big moments in secondary market history. And right now, he suggests, the story has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX.

The result: the storyline is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Anderson’s reading of Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg says reported earlier this week: Demand for the company’s stock has become virtually insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, as saying that buyers had indicated to his team that they had $2 billion in cash ready to invest in Anthropic, while about $600 million of OpenAI stock that investors are trying to sell has not yet found any takers.

Anderson sees something similar with Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to find in our market is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch from his home in Miami yesterday afternoon. “There just aren’t any sellers.”

Part of what boosted that demand, Anderson argues, was Anthropic’s very public standoff with the Defense Department — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but ultimately turned out to be a gift.

“The app became more popular, people rallied around the company as some kind of hero and took on big government,” he said. “I think it strengthened the story and made it even more differentiated from OpenAI.”

That distinction is becoming increasingly meaningful for investors entering a market where for years the prevailing logic was to bet on everyone. Anderson notes that many institutional investors still want exposure to both Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury is still out,” he said, on which AI model will ultimately win – but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has shifted.

That doesn’t mean OpenAI has fallen off a cliff. Anderson shifts somewhat back to a binary interpretation of the situation.

“I wouldn’t say it’s one or the other conversation,” he said.

But the excitement is not there. “It’s not nearly as vibrant a market as Anthropic right now,” he acknowledged.

On the valuation front, Anderson broadly confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting that OpenAI shares are trading on the secondary market as if the company is valued at $765 billion — a significant discount to the company’s latest primary round valuation of $852 billion. He cautioned that he was working from memory, but said the Bloomberg figure was “in the right range.”

OpenAI itself has been trying to gain more control over secondary trading. “People should be extremely cautious of any company claiming to have access to OpenAI stock, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting that the company had set up authorized channels through banks, without fees, to counter what it described as a high-fee brokerage model.

Perhaps tellingly – at least for now – banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have started offering OpenAI shares to their wealthy clients without charging carrying fees, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, meanwhile, charges the usual carry — often 15% to 20% of profits — for clients seeking anthropic exposure.

What none of this does is SpaceX, which stands out amid the changing sentiment around these other powerful brands. Anderson describes it as one of the few names in the Rainmaker universe that never experienced the punishing correction that hit much of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a period when the shares of many private companies fell 60% to 70% from their peaks (after their valuations had risen just as quickly).

The rocket and satellite giant has been “almost consistently up and to the right,” Anderson said.

Anderson, who obviously has an economic interest in flattering the company and its previous backers, credits SpaceX management with disciplined pricing and not squeezing every last dollar out of every financing round or bid.

“Many companies will give in to the temptation to maximize the price of their shares in each round,” he said. “The problem is that that leaves no room for error.”

SpaceX, on the other hand, played it conservatively, by “not getting too greedy,” and the payoff for earlier investors was huge. “You can imagine if someone got in in 2015, what kind of profit they are sitting on now,” Anderson says.

To make that point even more precise, SpaceX was valued at roughly $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the company. Someone who got in at that price now has a profit of over 100x, valuing the company at over $1 trillion ahead of the planned IPO.

That IPO now seems imminent. SpaceX confidentially filed for an initial public offering this week, setting the stage for what could be one of the biggest market debuts in history, with Elon Musk reportedly looking to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s debut in 2019, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, came close.

Not surprisingly, the rumors have already changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX stock, Anderson said.

“Today I saw a stream of SpaceX investors coming to me and saying, ‘Can you give me SpaceX?’” he noted. “It was a very active buying side.” But the supply is drying up. The closer a company gets to an IPO, the less incentive existing shareholders have to sell because they see the liquidity event on the horizon.

That’s where things get a little tougher for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly exploring their own public offerings and have indicated they could move this year. But SpaceX is about to test the market’s appetite in a big way by being the first to file, and Anderson suggested whoever follows will be at a disadvantage.

“SpaceX is going to absorb a lot of liquidity,” he said bluntly. “There is only a limited amount of money available for IPOs.” The first mover gets to the trough first; those who follow will face more scrutiny and possibly less capital.

It’s a dynamic that plays out in every so-called vertical sector and to which AI companies are not completely immune, despite the attention currently being focused on them. If you plan your IPO too early, you are the one testing the market’s receptiveness. Wait for someone else to go first, and the biggest checks may already have been written.

You can hear more of our interview with Anderson on the upcoming episode of the Download Strictly VC podcast, which appears every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out recent episodes, including those with Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.