Episode summary
What a $1.3 Trillion Investor Thinks About SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic
How I Invest With David Weisburd
· · 26 min · Hosts: David Weisburd · Guests: Matt Witheiler
Summary
Matt Witheiler argues that a wave of giant private companies, especially SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, could reopen the IPO window and restore growth to public markets. He says Wellington’s scale means the firm can absorb these deals easily, and that index inclusion for very large listings would likely create a helpful balance of passive buying and insider selling.
He also says the real shortage in public markets is not capital but growth: as more hypergrowth companies stay private longer, the number of public names with 30%+ revenue growth has shrunk dramatically. That shift, he argues, is pushing both institutional and retail investors toward late-stage private markets if they want exposure to disruption and AI without relying only on semiconductor names.
Witheiler frames late-stage investing as fundamentally different from venture or public equities. The strategy is to underwrite mature businesses with at least $50 million of revenue, not to buy tiny PowerPoint-stage startups, and not to try to trade momentum or value without control over liquidity. His core advice is to be valuation disciplined, but not a pure value investor, because the best companies can grow into their prices quickly.
Key takeaways
- Witheiler says SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic could reopen the IPO market rather than overwhelm it, because public investors are hungry for growth.
- He argues the public market now has only four tech companies with consensus forward revenue growth of 30% or more, versus about 10 times that number five or six years ago.
- He says late-stage private investing should target mature businesses with at least $50 million of revenue, not early-stage speculative bets.
- He считает momentum and value are hard to execute in late-stage private markets because liquidity is not under the investor’s control.
- Witheiler’s biggest miss was SpaceX, which he says looked like a launch-business-only story until Elon Musk proved the broader thesis right.
Notable quotes
“I think it will do absolutely nothing to the IPO market except open the window back up”
“the number is four public companies that are forecasting and have consensus forward revenue growth of 30% or more year-over-year”
“If you look at space as a as an example, one of the narratives around SpaceX and what is driving the interest in that name is you have a launch business”
“it is impossible, impossible to be a momentum or value investor in the late stage private market”
“you have to be valuation disciplined, but you can't be a value investor”
How the episode opens
If you look at where SpaceX is rumored to be going out, we're talking at like 1.75 trillion dollars. You can't not have that in the index. It needs to be in there.
And the number is four public companies that are forecasting and have consensus forward revenue growth of 30% or more year-over-year. When these names, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., ultimately come out, they will be a growth story for a public investor who has really struggled to get growth.
Matt, you're at Wellington, which has 1.3 trillion dollars with a T under management. A lot of people are wondering with these large IPOs coming up, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, what is that going to do to the IPO market? And what are the second-order effects of that?
I think it will do absolutely nothing to the IPO market except open the window back up. And the reason I say that is because I have the insight that I can gather from our public team, 1.3 trillion as you mentioned before, in how much appetite there is to add net new names. There's two components to how these will go.
Component one is how will they be sourced? How will we find capital for them? And number two is is how will they be received?
How will they trade? And I think on the first one, if you think about 1.3 trillion, we are just one asset manager globally. There is plenty of capital to go out and fund the, call it, 200, 250 billion dollars, maybe even more that's coming to market in those three IPOs.
Secondly, there is insatiable demand for growth stories today in the public market. Those three offer really unique opportunities for growth.
Said another way, there's 250 billion in total supply from these three companies.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- ipo markets
- ai private vs public
- late-stage investing
- valuation discipline
- liquidity dynamics
Companies and tickers mentioned
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- SpaceX
- Wellington Management
- AnandTech
- Flybridge Capital Partners
- AlphaSense
Watch the episode
Watch “What a $1.3 Trillion Investor Thinks About SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
More from How I Invest With David Weisburd
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Hunter Walk: Why Venture is Getting Harder, Picking Great Founders, and Investing Against Consensus -
True Anomaly’s Even Rogers on Space Warfare, China’s Military Advantage, and the Defense Tech Boom -
Finding the Next Anthropic, Quantifying Venture Capital, and the Science of Picking Winners -
Why 95% of AI Projects Fail, Anthropic still at $2T?, and Why AI Is Still in the First Inning -
Peter Thiel's 27-Year Partner on the AI Bubble, the Venture Capital Crisis, and the PayPal Mafia -
Why Venture Is Eating Public Markets, Picking Great VCs, and the AI Boom w/Brijesh Jeevarathnam
How I Invest With David Weisburd, this episode and its artwork belong to David Weisburd. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
