Will We See a Repeat of the Big Three IPO Phenomenon in the Future?

This year’s big three initial public offerings are SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, and the hype around all three has been tremendous. Massive value is coming onto the market with just these three names, and there’s debate about whether we’ll ever see anything like this again.

At the 2026 Morningstar Investment Conference, PitchBook’s Paul Condra, Kyle Stanford and James Ulan discussed this year’s mega pipeline for IPOs.

Repeat or no repeat?

Stanford believes there probably won’t be anything like this cycle happening again in the next 10 years— or even perhaps our lifetime. He said most of this year’s IPO value is coming from the now-merged xAI and SpaceX, with Anthropic and OpenAI rounding out the big three for 2026. Stanford believes it’s incredible that 53% of all of this year’s expected exit value is tied to three companies.

He noted that companies are staying private longer, as the way businesses were built in the private markets changed in 2010 and 2011. Since then, companies have been expected to grow their revenues before their fundamentals. Additionally, since a huge number of $10 billion venture capital funds are buying massive chunks of private companies, there’s no incentive to go public in the usual timeframe.