Anthropic PBC filed confidentially for an initial public offering on Monday at a $965 billion valuation, completing a trio of mega-listings alongside SpaceX and OpenAI. Together, the three companies could carry a combined market value of $4 trillion to $5 trillion once public.
Some investors are nervous. After all, three of the largest equity offerings ever are landing within months of each other. That will soak up the cash that holds everything else up, they argue.
Veteran strategist Ed Yardeni says the worry is misplaced. He laid out the math in a client note on Monday.
“The combined market value of these three companies is widely expected to total $4 trillion to $5 trillion once they go public,” Yardeni wrote. “The capital being raised is around $200 billion.”
Valuation Is Not The Same As Fundraising
At first glance, a $5 trillion wave of listings sounds like a vacuum capable of pulling money out of every corner of the market. But a company’s market value counts every share that exists. The cash it raises is only the slice it actually sells to the public.
That slice is what hits the market: roughly $200 billion spread across three deals over several months. And the market it is landing in is enormous. The Wilshire 5000, a benchmark to gauge the overall health of the entire U.S. stock market, carries a market capitalization of roughly $75.6 trillion. The S&P 500, alone, is worth nearly $60 trillion.
Set against that, U.S. equity markets already financed $232 billion in new stock issuance over the twelve months through April, and more than $450 billion was raised during the 2021 boom.
How Much Stock Is Actually For Sale?
Even $200 billion may overstate it, because the public is being offered remarkably little.
A company’s free float is the portion of its shares that actually trades hands in public. The rest stays locked with founders, insiders and early backers, off the market entirely.
“SpaceX is only floating roughly 4.3% of its shares to the public,” Yardeni wrote, adding that the other two are likely to provide “relatively puny free float.”
The contrast with today’s market leaders is stark.
The Magnificent Seven command roughly $24 trillion in combined value, with public ownership running from 81% to 98% of their shares.
That scarcity is also why the public’s way into these companies has so far run through their listed backers. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) has poured about $8 billion into Anthropic and agreed to commit up to $25 billion more, on top of a separate pledge of up to $50 billion to OpenAI.
For most investors, owning Amazon has been the closest thing to owning the AI-3 before the AI-3 became stocks.
So these companies may wear trillion-dollar price tags while the amount of stock anyone can actually buy stays small. A huge valuation does not require a huge amount of buying.
The IPOs Could Bring New Money In, Not Drain It Out
There is also a case that these listings add fuel rather than burn it.
Yardeni indicates that 62% of U.S. adults already owned stock last year, and that assets held in individual retirement accounts likely top $20 trillion.
Households ended last year with a record 36.8% of their net worth and 47.1% of their financial assets in equities.
The pull of artificial intelligence could draw fresh retail money into the market rather than simply reshuffling what is already there.
Brokers have already begun inviting clients into the SpaceX deal — retail access on a scale unusual for a listing this large.
The Real Risk Isn’t Liquidity: It’s The Price
If there is a reason to worry, it is not where the money comes from. It is what investors are paying for.
By Yardeni’s tally, the combined 2025 losses of the three companies topped $25 billion, with much of their projected value tied to AI markets that do not yet generate revenue.
The bet is not on this year’s numbers. It is in the next decade.
Wall Street looks far less worried about finding the money than about how much it will ultimately pay for the next generation of AI champions. That question does not have an answer yet.
