Chamath Palihapitiya said on the All-In Podcast that the 2026 IPO class faces a sequencing problem, and that companies waiting behind SpaceX may find the market has already eaten its fill.

“Get the heck out and get public and get your money and fortify your balance sheet ASAP,” Palihapitiya said. “I think the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you’re in.”

The warning lands days after Bloomberg reported that roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares sat unsold on secondary marketplaces.

Next Round Capital founder Ken Smythe told Bloomberg his firm could not find a single buyer among hundreds of institutional investors.

A year ago, that stock would have cleared in days.

Bids that did materialize came in around $765 billion, a 10% discount to OpenAI’s $852 billion primary round valuation.

Anthropic Is The Opposite Story

While OpenAI shares gather dust, Anthropic is seeing what one secondary broker called “essentially unlimited interest.”

Hiive, a secondary market platform, registered more than $1.6 billion in demand for Anthropic shares at roughly $600 billion. Augment co-founder Adam Crawley told Bloomberg the math is simple: better risk-reward.

On Polymarket, traders give Anthropic a 66% chance of going public before OpenAI. A separate contract prices OpenAI’s odds of completing an IPO by year-end at just 40%.

The Thanksgiving Problem

Palihapitiya framed the IPO pipeline as a Thanksgiving dinner. SpaceX gets consumed first. The next company does “good to great.” Then appetite runs out.

“You just can’t absorb incrementally trillions of dollars of new demand,” he said.

SpaceX filed its S-1 confidentially on April 1, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation with a potential June listing. Polymarket gives it an 89% chance of being the largest IPO of 2026 and prices a 69% chance the listing happens by the end of June.

Palihapitiya argued that once SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are all public, the AI technology baked into all three will cannibalize the moats supporting current tech multiples. He expects tech-sector P/E ratios to compress toward non-tech levels.

What Traders Are Watching

David Friedberg added on the pod that Middle Eastern sovereign capital, historically a major source of late-stage funding, may be tightening due to the Iran conflict. That would shrink the buyer pool further just as selling pressure peaks.

For investors in Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), the stakes are direct. Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI’s latest round is partially contingent on a 2028 IPO.

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) remains the most liquid public proxy for SpaceX exposure, trading around $352.

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