September should have been a busy month for US IPOs. Instead, only four operating companies debuted (excluding SPACs), several pulled their offerings, and the two largest AI labs both reportedly pushed their timelines back. The Nasdaq hit record highs over the same period, so this isn't a market-wide sell-off. It's a public market being selective about price, disclosure and timing.

This year, the bell finally rang for SpaceX. Its listing became one of the largest public debuts on record, and Anthropic and OpenAI are now taking their own steps toward the public markets. Taken together, these companies could introduce more than $3 trillion of new market value to public investors in a matter of months, representing a concentration of value entering the public markets in a single window that has few precedents.

SpaceX prices its IPO Thursday, with first trades Friday on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX, at a fixed $135 per share. The base raise is $75 billion, rising toward $86 billion if underwriters exercise the over-allotment, the largest offering in history by a wide margin. In the same stretch, Anthropic and OpenAI each confidentially filed draft S-1 paperwork with the SEC. Anthropic filed first, on the heels of a funding round valuing the company near $965 billion. OpenAI followed

Two pieces of news this week that, taken together, say something bigger about where private markets are heading.

Value creation is staying private. Liquidity is learning to follow it as venture secondaries become a crucial on-ramp. For most of modern venture history, the script was straightforward: invest early, support the company, and wait for an IPO or acquisition to unlock returns. That script is now being rewritten as two powerful signals are converging.

Access Is Expanding — and That Raises the Bar for Discipline There’s a quiet but important signal coming out of Washington. The U.S. House has passed the INVEST Act of 2025 — a broad capital-formation package aimed at modernizing how capital flows into growing companies. It’s not law yet. The Senate still needs to act. But the direction of travel is clear: policymakers recognize that more value creation is happening in private markets — and they’re exploring ways to exp

The IPO market is technically open…but it’s already becoming choosy. A week ago, Blackstone’s president declared that “2026 should be the year of the IPO.” Just days later, one of Blackstone’s own portfolio companies put that assumption to question. On the surface, it was a busy week for new listings, with seven IPOs and six SPACs pricing. But it was also notable for what didn’t happen.

After two years of a constrained exit environment, private-market liquidity is increasingly being delivered through secondaries and structured transactions, not traditional IPOs.

Nvidia’s recent $20 billion acqui-hire of Groq is more than a single high-profile transaction — it’s a clear signal that consolidation in AI hardware is accelerating.