Inside the Private Stock Market Boom: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI & the Rise of Secondaries

Private secondaries have become a central theme for late-stage tech finance: the panel framed a market where record secondary volume is changing how employees, VCs and retail investors access the biggest private companies. Brad Gerstner opened with charts showing secondary activity has roughly doubled since the end of 2021 and that employee secondaries comprised about 31% of primary venture activity in 2025. Gavin Baker and other investors argued that secondaries pricing flipped from discounted levels (around $0.80 on the dollar) to a premium (about $1.06 in Q1 2025), signaling intense bid-side demand even as SPVs and off‑market liquidity raised concerns about fees and transparency (examples cited: 10% loads, double carry structures).

The conversation then turned to consequences and trade-offs. Gavin emphasized the human and fiduciary side: orderly liquidity programs are necessary because employees can be cash-poor despite paper wealth, and long private lives (SpaceX cited as ~24 years private) make structured secondaries important. Kelly — who ran a private company and later a public one — pushed back on romanticizing private status, arguing public scrutiny disciplines management and that democratized distribution (e.g., Schwab plugging ~46 million investors / $12 trillion of retail demand into private offerings) can be positive. Panelists disagreed about whether companies should remain private longer: one speaker said “there is no good reason” to extend private status while others noted founders prefer the perceived freedom of private ownership. They also covered market structure shifts: interval/closed-end funds and tokenization could broaden access (some products with $500 minimums were mentioned), regulatory self-limits on long‑only allocators (typically 3–7% despite a 15% SEC allowance) create latent demand that will flow back once lockups expire, and public pricing risks remain—panelists likened current behavior to 2021 froth rather than 1999–2000 mania and warned retail entrants often YOLO at peaks. The session closed with practical secondary ideas (DriveNets, ARIA, Revolut, Neuro-robotics, Zipline, VAST) and unanimous emphasis on building better infrastructure and disclosure to make this new private-market ecosystem durable rather than a speculative fad.