In the first mega IPO of 2026, SpaceX (SPCX) singled out one person in its prospectus as the shot caller: none other than the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
The next big IPO of the year — Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), which could be the largest of all time — is run more by a committee of founders. That’s a good thing given its mission and structures, according to veteran dealmaker Jim Neeson.
“I would say having seven founders working together can make it where it’s not just like a cult of Elon Musk, right?” the Connor Group founding executive said on Sozzi Unleashed. “You actually have it where you have a consortium of people making decisions, which I actually think can be a good thing.”
Neeson noted that Anthropic is a public benefit company with seven founders who collectively own 50.1%.
“You have a board that will be approved by sort of a trust fund. And then you also have a business where it’s not just going to be about profits. It’s also going to be sort of the social benefit piece that’s built into their doctrine,” he explained.
Anthropic’s founders are CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and president, Daniela Amodei, as well as Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Chris Olah. The consortium left OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) to start Anthropic in January 2021.
The seven co-founders will be issued new Class F common stock as part of the IPO, giving them majority control of the company — something Neeson said investors will have to navigate.
“If you look at Meta, [and] you also look at Google, you had very strong founders,” Neeson said. “A lot of times that is the venture capital case. I want founders that can make strong decisions and not be beholden to sort of quarterly type of trends.”
“This is going to be a different type of structure out there, and it’s going to be tested,” he added. “We’ve never seen it, especially at this scale, especially at these growth rates. So I would say that’s one thing analysts and investors are going to be looking very closely at.”
The group looks to be managing the financials relatively well.
Anthropic’s first-half 2026 revenue surged to $16.3 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier, the prospectus showed. The filing also discloses an $80.7 billion first-half net loss, a strong signal of aggressive AI spending in the years ahead.
On an adjusted basis, Anthropic posted $1.62 billion in operating income through the first six months of 2026 compared to a loss of $1.85 billion last year.
Investment bankers are reportedly aiming for an astronomical listing valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
Anthropic could debut on public markets before the end of November. It plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT.
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