SpaceX And Meta Dominate The Century’s Biggest Startup Payoffs. But No. 6 Is A Surprise

This article written by Brian Contreras was originally published on Inc.com.

Since the start of the 21st century, venture capital has evolved into one of the dominant forces in the American economy, providing liquidity to companies that were increasingly eager to stay private and—especially in recent years—raising mind-bogglingly large pools of cash to fuel the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

So how has this decades-long experiment in private financing played out? VC firm Founder Collective—which has invested in Uber, SeatGeek and Whoop, among others—recently set out to calculate the 500 most valuable startup exits that VCs have scored since 2000. In other words: how big were the biggest payoffs of its most ambitious 21st century bets?

In some ways, the line-up that Founder Collective ultimately arrived at is unsurprising. For instance, Elon Musk comes out of the final tally looking like he’s worth the hype. The tech mogul is behind both the first and third entries on the list: the recently-IPO’d space ventures company SpaceX, worth US$2 trillion when the list was first compiled (although it’s now under $1.9 trillion following a recent drop-off), and the electric car powerhouse Tesla, which IPO’d in 2010 and now enjoys a market cap somewhere between $1.25 trillion and $1.5 trillion.

Filling out the other top spots on the list are a mix of mega-scale consumer platforms (Meta, Uber), data and cybersecurity giants (Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike), and enterprise software tools (AppLovin, Shopify). But in sixth place sits a high earner you may have never heard of: cloud networking specialist Arista Networks, which IPO’d in 2014 and now has a $231 billion market cap.

Here’s the breakdown of the top 10 firms on the list, using market caps as of July 9:

1. SpaceX: $2 trillion
2. Meta: $1.6 trillion
3. Tesla: $1.3 trillion
4. Palantir: $314 billion
5. Palo Alto Networks: $289 billion
6. Arista Networks: $213 billion
7. CrowdStrike: $205 billion
8. AppLovin: $176 billion
9. Shopify: $163 billion
10. Uber: $152 billion

Also near the top of the food chain are Robinhood (No. 13, at $103 billion), Spotify (No. 14, at $101 billion), Airbnb (No. 18, at $90.7 billion), CoreWeave (No. 29, at $45.4 billion), and Zoom (No. 50, at $25.8 billion).

In total, $10 trillion in value has been created across the startup ecosystem during this timespan, Founder Collective notes in its write-up of the data, with a dozen entrants on the list worth over $100 billion each.

Startup founders often “fixate on crossing the billion-dollar threshold as quickly as possible,” the report says, yet about 10 percent of these 500 top startups failed to secure double-digit valuations through a public listing or M&A. “If startup outcomes continue to resemble anything like this distribution, many founders and investors may be benchmarking themselves against overly ambitious assumptions,” the report says.

Founder Collective constrained its methodology in a few key ways. The analysis intentionally excluded most biotechnology, medtech, and life sciences firms, for instance, in an effort to focus on tech firms or those backed by tech-friendly investors—so the list is not a holistic overview of VC in the 21st century. Indeed, that timeline is itself a constraint, given that it excludes both older companies, such as Apple and Nvidia, as well as some of VC’s newest, yet-to-exit darlings.

“This is an inherently backward-looking exercise,” the report says. “Some of the defining companies of the current generation—OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, and others—remain private, and trillions of dollars of value have yet to be realized. The rankings will change as liquidity events occur.”

In other words, we’ll have to check back in after another 25 years to see how this rising class of AI and AI-enabled companies stacks up.