Glen Anderson has been trading private equity since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.
As president of investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which specializes exclusively in the private equity market and facilitates transactions for about 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the biggest ticking moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.
Conclusion: the storyline is more complex than the titles suggest.
Anderson’s reading from Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: demand for the company’s stock is nearly insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, as saying that buyers have shown his outfit that they have $2 billion in cash ready to send to Anthropic, even as the roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares investors are trying to sell haven’t found takers.
Anderson sees the same thing in Rainmaker. “The most difficult stock to find in our market is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his home in Miami. “There are just no sellers.”
Part of what drove that demand, Anderson says, was Anthropic’s public disagreement with the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but ended up being a gift.
“The app became very popular, people met the company as a hero, taking on the big government,” he said. “I think it expanded the story and made it very different from OpenAI.”
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That distinction is increasingly meaningful to investors navigating a market where, for years, the dominant 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 when the AI model will ultimately succeed — but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has shifted.
That doesn’t mean OpenAI has fallen off a cliff. Anderson backs away from a binary reading of the situation.
“I can’t say it’s one conversation or the other,” he said.
But happiness is not there. “It’s not as healthy a market as Anthropic right now,” he admitted.
In the math, Anderson broadly confirmed a Bloomberg report that OpenAI’s shares on the secondary market trade as if the company were worth $765 billion — a steep discount to the company’s new valuation of $852 billion. He cautioned that he was working off the cuff, but said Bloomberg’s figure was “in the right range.”
OpenAI itself has tried to assert more control over secondary trading. “People should be very careful of any company that wants to access OpenAI equity, including an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting that the company has established channels authorized by banks, without funding, to counter what it described as a high-cost merchant model.
Perhaps it should – at least for now – banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering shares of OpenAI to their high-net-worth clients without charging them a carrying fee, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, on the other hand, charges its standard rate — typically 15% to 20% of profits — to clients seeking exposure to Anthropic.
Missing from this is SpaceX, which stands out among the changing sentiments of these other powerful brands. Anderson describes it as one of the only names in the Rainmaker universe that hasn’t faced the punitive correction that hit much of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a period when many private-equity stocks are down 60% to 70% from their peaks (after their valuations rose just as quickly).
The rocket and satellite behemoth “has been up and to the right,” Anderson said.
Anderson, naturally, who has an economic interest in flattering the company and its former supporters, praises the management of SpaceX for systematic prices and does not reduce every last dollar in each round of funding or tender offer.
“Many companies will fall into the temptation of increasing their stock price in every round,” he said. “The problem is that that doesn’t leave any room for error.”
SpaceX, by contrast, has played it safe, “not too greedy,” and the profits for early investors have been huge. “You can imagine if someone enters in 2015 what kind of profit they are making right now,” said Anderson.
To put a finer point on that comment: SpaceX was valued at about $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the company. The person who got in at that price is now sitting on more than 100x earnings, valuing the company at more than 1 trillion ahead of its planned IPO.
That IPO is now imminent, apparently. SpaceX filed this week for an initial public offering, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s 2019 debut, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, is close.
Unsurprisingly, the filing of the rumor has changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson.
“Today, I saw a lot of SpaceX investors coming to me and saying, ‘Can you give me SpaceX?'” he noted. “It’s been the active side of shopping.” But supply is running out. When a company approaches an IPO, existing shareholders are less likely to sell because they can see a liquidity event on the horizon.
This is where things get a little slow for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly evaluating their public offerings and have indicated they may go this year. But SpaceX, by entering first, is about to test market food in a big way, and Anderson suggested that anyone who follows will be at a disadvantage.
“SpaceX is going to make a lot of money,” he said bluntly. “There’s a lot of money out there allocated to IPOs.” The first mover gets to the trough first; those who follow face both more scrutiny and, potentially, less money.
It’s a dynamic that plays out across so-called verticals and where AI companies aren’t completely immune, despite their current attention. File your IPO too early and you’re the one gauging market acceptance. Wait for someone else to go first, and you might get big checks already written.
You can hear more about our interview with Anderson in an upcoming episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, which drops every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out the latest episodes, including those with Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.
