Inside the Private Stock Market Boom: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI & the Rise of Secondaries

**Gavin Baker** (0:00)
Everybody wants access to these private markets.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:02)
I'm going to try now to discuss all of this is Kelly Rodriques.

**Kelly Rodriques** (0:05)
She's the Ford CEO. We see a world where the private market opens up and is accessible to any US and global investor. There's 19 companies in the private market AI basket. These companies have grown on average 300 percent.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:20)
Please join us in welcoming Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides.

**Gavin Baker** (0:24)
The ROI in AI has empirically, factually, unambiguously been possible. Investing is the search for truth.

**Kelly Rodriques** (0:33)
We welcome in Brad Gerstner.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:34)
It's good to be back with you.

**Gavin Baker** (0:36)
You have a program called Invest America.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:38)
I think we have a historic moment right now to get everybody into the game of capitalism.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:46)
We have a few slides from Brad to kick this off.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:49)
You know, let's get going.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:51)
A little spicy thought story.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:53)
Like old times.
This panel, I actually was backstage, I said, Gavin, do you know we're talking about secondaries? He's like, what do you mean? And I said, okay, so here, let's just set this up for everybody. The room's full of people who are allocators, people are looking for distributions. So this is secondary markets over the course of the last decade. This is the amount of money going into VC each year, the amount of money coming out of VC each year. The red line represents the net effect of that. So, Chamath, we're in like five years, right? Where a lot more is going in than is coming out. But the secondary market is at record volume. So this is, you know, I call these companies quasi-public companies. These are these later stage companies. There's buying and selling that's going on every day. Look at that, Jason, relative to the 21 peak. We thought that was crazy at the end of 21 We're double that now in terms of secondary transactions. This is the amount of employee secondary. So this is people buying in to Andro, Anthropic, SpaceX, now represents 31% of all primary venture activity is buying into these secondaries in 2025
Secondaries are now competing with IPOs and acquisitions as the principal way that these guys are exiting. So I thought that was a decent setup to start the conversation this morning, just to level set how important secondaries have become. And the final one is, secondaries over the last couple of years were trading at a discount to market. So if we wanted to sell shares in one of our companies, right, to buyers out there, they were willing to give us 80 cents on the dollar in order for us to get liquid so that we could send DPI back to RLPs. Today, it's at 106
So a premium in the market as a Q125.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:40)
And this doesn't include some of the wild west of SPVs that have been unraveled recently.
People charging 10 percent load-in fees, double carry and a lot of gray market, off market stuff. This is also having a profound impact, Gavin, on employees at these companies that I want to hear about because you've seen it up close and personal with SpaceX, and they have a very orderly process here. So why don't we start there? What impact is this having on the employees, Gavin, and then on the market? How orderly is this?
And who are the buyers? Are the buyers the sucker at the table? Are these family offices, high net worth individuals who keep hearing us talk about Anthropic or SpaceX or Andrel and they just say, I have to own the name and they're not discerning. So, Gavin, maybe you could start about the impact on the SpaceX employees you saw firsthand, et cetera.

**Gavin Baker** (3:38)
Maybe broadening beyond SpaceX. I do just think if companies are going to be staying private longer, this is absolutely necessary.
I think there are a lot of people who are very wealthy on paper, but actually cash poor. And if you're making tremendous sacrifices because you work for a company that you really believe in and you're contributing a lot to that company, it's hard if you can't buy a nice house for your family. It's hard if you can't afford to do nice things.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:12)
Especially in your seven, eight or nine of working at the company. You tell your spouse we're worth 10 million on paper, 30 million on paper, and you don't own your home.

**Gavin Baker** (4:20)
Yeah, our year 15 And so I think this is necessary and important. And, you know, whether it is good or bad, I think it is very clear that companies are going to stay private for longer.