The back-to-back-to-back round of massive public offerings that began this week is going to make a select group of employees of three technology firms very, very rich.
SpaceX, the rocket and artificial intelligence company, said on Thursday it had raised about $75 billion from its offering, putting its valuation at $1.77 trillion. Anthropic, the A.I. start-up that makes the Claude chatbot, and its ChatGPT-making rival, OpenAI, have also both filed to go public soon. Each of those companies has an estimated valuation approaching $1 trillion.
The mega-listings are projected to create over 20 new billionaires from the companies’ ranks of current and former employees, according to an analysis for The New York Times by Sacra, a private markets research company.
They will have access to publicly traded shares that can more easily be turned into very real spending power. (At least, they will at the conclusion of lockup periods, during which company insiders are not allowed to sell their shares.)
That includes Gwynne Shotwell, the longtime SpaceX chief operating officer who controls a stake in the company projected to be worth under $2 billion.
And when Anthropic and OpenAI go public, billionaires at those firms will eventually have mountains of public shares available to sell. That list will include people like Greg Brockman, the Open AI co-founder and president, who testified in a trial last month that his shares in the A.I. start-up were worth $30 billion. And Dario Amodei, the Anthropic co-founder and chief executive, has a net worth already estimated at about $8 billion.
“The magnitude of wealth creation is unprecedented,” said Marcelo Ballvé, Sacra’s head of research.
Sacra previously predicted that the three I.P.O.s could create more than 16,000 millionaires. Minting these new millionaires could lead to inflated real estate prices in already expensive markets like the Bay Area, higher demand for luxury goods like private planes and greater investments back into the start-up ecosystem.
But the rise of the new billionaires could have much grander impacts on society. That group could lead a rash of new mega-philanthropy and political giving. Or they could buy private islands and sports franchises.
Not to mention Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, who became a trillionaire on Friday.
To make the projections, Sacra analyzed the wealth distribution from previous large tech I.P.O.s. It then analyzed SpaceX’s I.P.O. documents and conducted simulations of Anthropic and OpenAI’s expected public offerings.
The analysis included only current and former employees, not any new billionaires created among outside investors in the companies.
Each of the companies would rank among the world’s largest ever public listings, competing only with the I.P.O. of the Saudi oil company Aramco in 2019, which went public at a $1.7 trillion valuation.
The sudden boom of billionaire wealth stems in part from the companies waiting so long to go public, Mr. Ballvé said.
Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer at Facebook, held 0.07 percent of the company’s stock in 2012 when it went public valued at $104 billion, Mr. Ballvé said. That minted her a $73 million equity stake.
But what would the same percentage stake come out to at the much-loftier valuation for SpaceX, which has been private for 24 years? That would be worth $1.2 billion, Mr. Ballvé said.
“That’s what happens when you get an I.P.O. that is 17 Facebooks,” he added.
