SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and their giga-IPO dreams

A DECADE OR so ago, before venture capitalists and buy-out barons began whipping out their chequebooks, going public was the obvious choice for ambitious businesses. A stockmarket listing offered startups both cash, courtesy of deep pools of capital, and cachet, conferred by a willingness to subject themselves to the scrutiny of millions of investors. It was possible to attain a $100bn-plus valuation while staying out of the stockmarket spotlight: Lidl may have pulled it off with cheap groceries, Mars with confectionery, Cargill peddling the sort of stuff that goes into Mars bars, Gulf and Chinese natural-resource firms extracting less digestible commodities, Vitol and Trafigura trading these. But if it was explosive growth you were after, the real rocket fuel was to be found in public markets.