Elon Musk’s SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) pulled off the biggest IPO in history in June, leaving the universities that backed it early with an enviable problem: stakes so valuable that they now dominate endowment portfolios.
Washington University in St. Louis reportedly earned a 3,000% return, while Harvard holds $2.2 billion of SpaceX stock and UConn has 7% of its endowment invested in the company.
Anthropic may soon create a similar concentration problem for its own early backers. The Claude maker could go public later this year in an offering expected to match or exceed SpaceX’s $86.2 billion haul.
If it succeeds, early investors would face the same choice now confronting SpaceX’s backers: cash out of a big winner or stay heavily exposed to one volatile stock.
SpaceX Delivered a 3,000% University Windfall
Washington University made its investment almost a decade ago. The stake now represents more than 10% of the school’s $17 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg.
Harvard’s $2.2 billion position is its largest disclosed investment, while the University of California holds about $1 billion. The University of North Carolina’s investment manager sold some shares before the IPO but still holds roughly $1 billion, helping put the endowment on course for a return above 30% this year.
“I don’t like that we have 7% in anything,” David Ford, chair of the investment committee for UConn’s $725 million endowment, told Bloomberg. “It’s a good dilemma. We might have a different dilemma if we didn’t own any.”
SpaceX shares were trading around $136 on Friday, almost their $135 IPO price, after climbing as high as $201.80 and falling as low as $108.27.
Anthropic Wants to Surpass SpaceX
Pulling off a deal of that size would be extraordinary for a company founded only five years ago. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, but its appetite for capital remains enormous: it lost nearly $42 billion in 2025 as the cost of building frontier AI systems soared.
Since combining with xAI, Musk’s company competes directly with Anthropic through Grok while also supplying Anthropic with computing capacity under an agreement that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over three years.
Polymarket Traders Bet On A $1.8 Trillion First-Day Close
Traders on Polymarket give Anthropic a 72% chance of closing its first trading day with a market capitalization of at least $1.8 trillion.
A separate market puts the odds of the company completing an IPO by the end of October at 83%. More than $1.8 million has traded on the question.
Anthropic did not identify any universities among the significant investors in its latest funding round. Its private ownership remains opaque, however, and universities’ extensive investments in venture funds make it likely that at least some endowment money has indirect exposure.
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