SpaceX is about to price one of the largest IPOs in history.

The headline practically writes itself: SpaceX intends to go public around $1.75 trillion, bigger than Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019. Buy the stock and own a piece of the future in space and artificial intelligence.

But if you follow startups and venture, the more interesting story is hidden behind the headlines and accolades. It's everything that happened in private, where (historically) most people never hear about it.

Today, we’re talking about:

We originally invested in xAI through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which is a fund built to make a direct investment in a single company. It’s one of a few investment strategies we use to get into fast-growing startups on behalf of our investors.

Then, in February, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal, and our position in xAI converted into a position in the combined company.

It helps to understand what we have exposure to at USVC, because SpaceX isn't just a rocket company anymore. It's really three businesses under one roof:

And it may not stop there. In April, SpaceX secured the right to acquire Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI coding companies in the world, for a reported $60 billion later this year, or to continue its work through a compute partnership instead. If that option is exercised, the software that accelerates improvements on their technical infrastructure could sit under the same roof too.

On their own, each is a serious business. The reason the market may price the combination near $1.75 trillion is the bet that they compound and create vertical efficiency.

The bull case we’ve read goes something like this: The real bottleneck for frontier AI has stopped being algorithms and become physical (aka the compute and the power to run it). SpaceX can provide comparatively-cheap space delivery to unlock the energy and, eventually, compute where it's abundant in space. Starlink is both the network that moves the data and lays the breadcrumb for how SpaceX can build and operate hardware in orbit at scale. xAI brings the models and substantial compute through Collossus. X brings the real-time training data for better AI and distribution layer to reach hundreds of millions of users. And then better AI flows back down the stack, making every launch, satellite, factory, and future model beneath it cheaper to run.

In other words, it's a vertically integrated wager on space, connectivity, and AI at once, three of the most consequential arenas in the economy today, owned by one company, led by a founder who has spent two decades pushing all of them forward at the same time.

Now for the bear case we’ve heard: Whether $1.75 trillion is the right price for SpaceX is a question for the public markets to decide. SpaceX reported a $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026 and carries more than $41 billion in accumulated losses, according to its S-1. This is likely a company priced on what it might become, not what it earns today, and nearly every business under the roof is enormously capital-hungry.

And the same integration that makes the bull case could also be a risk. This is several moonshots stacked on top of one another, and $1.75 trillion valuation assumes enough of them pay off together. The private valuation ran from $350 billion to $1.75 trillion in eighteen months, and a good portion of that valuation ladder was set in deals between Elon-controlled entities rather than fully at arm's length. Not to mention, leadership could rest on a single founder split across multiple companies, with the occasional political crossfire.

Our job at USVC isn't to predict the opening print. It's to have gotten in early, and to have the structure to hold or sell through whatever the public market decides.

Stepping back from SpaceX speculation, the bigger story here could be what this IPO signals for venture as an asset class.

The most valuable companies of this generation are staying private longer and doing the majority of their growth before they ever list.

The median company that went public in 2024 was 14 years old, nearly double what it was in the mid-1990s, and arrived at its listing with roughly triple the revenue.

For most of modern history, the IPO was the on-ramp for public access. It was the moment ordinary investors finally got to participate in a company's rise.

That trend has quietly inverted. Increasingly, the IPO is the last chapter in access rather than the first, and the fastest stretch of the growth may have already happened.

I don't point this out to be cynical about public markets. I point it out because it's one of the most important things to understand about investing today: more and more of the value is being created in private.

SpaceX is simply the most dramatic proof we've seen.

And there could be a second-order effect in play for venture investors. For the last three years, the industry writ large has been starved of exits. The cash that's supposed to flow back to the people who fund venture funds has instead run negative by roughly $197 billion since 2022, as companies that could have gone public chose to wait.

Funds leaned on a record of secondary share sales last year just to return some capital. In other words, the engine that recycles money into the next generation of startups had largely stalled.

A listing of this size could restart it. When a private position this large finally turns into cash, it returns capital to the funds that backed the company early, which returns capital to their investors, much of which has historically gone right back to funding new companies.

If SpaceX is the first of several large listings this year, the capital flowing back towards early-stage companies could be the most we've seen in nearly a decade.

There's a final piece to this story for USVC investors, and it comes down to our evergreen structure.

When a traditional venture fund has a portfolio company go public, that fund is often forced to sell once the lockup lifts. These funds typically run on ten-year clocks and owe capital back to their investors on a schedule, which means they sometimes sell good companies early simply because the calendar requires it. That kind of forced selling is one of the most reliable ways to give back returns in an asset class built on letting winners run.

USVC is built differently. Because we're an evergreen fund, we aren't racing a countdown to exit. When one of our holdings goes public, we can continue to hold it, or we can harvest it into the sleeve of liquid assets that helps support our quarterly repurchase offers. It is at the Board's discretion and the subject of a recent article I posted on X that shares more on the mechanism by which USVC investors can sell their shares.

Getting in early and staying for as long as it makes financial sense is the whole point of this structure.

The largest IPO in history is a remarkable day for SpaceX, but we think it's an important one for venture too.

It’s one more proof point that the most consequential companies of our era can be built, funded, and grown to extraordinary scale almost entirely in private.

The investors positioned for that story were never the ones watching the listing from the outside. They were the ones who found a way in.

Through USVC, you no longer have to be an insider to be one of them.

— Ankur Nagpal, General Partner

Private markets have historically rewarded patient capital. The investors who've built real positions in venture didn't find the perfect moment. They started early and stayed long.

USVC is a way to build that position, starting with as little as $500.

Some decisions are better made in conversation than a self-service experience.

If you're thinking about a larger position in USVC or want to understand what we offer investors going deeper into private markets, our investor relations team is here for you.

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