This year's most sensational IPO: surged 1700%

Assuming we go back to 2010, if someone packaged Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Uber, which hadn’t IPO’d yet, into a single stock, would you buy it?

Across the ocean, such a unicorn combination was wildly bought up.

Recently, a fund called VCX, which uses super companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX as underlying assets, successfully IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange. Then a dramatic scene unfolded: in less than a week, VCX’s intraday stock price soared to a maximum of $575, an increase of over 1700% from its issue price. It’s astonishing.

With FOMO running high, some have called it “the craziest bubble stock in history.”

This year’s most bizarre IPO was bought up by retail investors

Interestingly, VCX’s parent company Fundrise originally focused on real estate crowdfunding.

In 2010, Ben Miller and Dan Miller, two brothers from Washington, had an idea: why can’t ordinary people directly invest in high-quality real estate projects? So they founded Fundrise. It was very successful, and after accumulating billions in assets under management, Fundrise ventured into venture capital in 2022, launching the VCX fund.

Using the familiar equity model, VCX aims to allow ordinary people to invest in top-tier tech unicorns.

On March 19, VCX officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In its holdings, Anthropic, Databricks, and OpenAI accounted for 20.7%, 17.7%, and 9.9%, respectively. Defense AI startup Anduril, private aerospace giant SpaceX, and gaming platform Epic Games were also among the top ten holdings.

The commonality among these companies is: they are in attractive sectors, are industry giants, and none of them have stock codes yet.

VCX’s website compellingly states: As top tech giants remain private for longer, ordinary investors are shut out; VCX has changed all that, allowing individuals to invest in the great tech companies of the future today.

With such grand visions, the management fee is only 1.85% annually.

The market responded with madness. Within a week of its listing, VCX’s stock price skyrocketed from its opening price of $31.25 to a peak increase of over 1700% to $575, and it wasn’t until March 26 that VCX began to reverse course.

Using the simplest logic, it can be inferred that the original shareholders must have made a fortune from this surge.

What’s surprising is that this time, the ones making a huge profit are not the top-tier VCs, but almost entirely retail investors. The prospectus shows that VCX has almost no traditional top ten institutional shareholders; over 90% of the shares are held by more than 100,000 ordinary retail investors, who had already subscribed as old shareholders before the fund went public.

But the profits are still only on paper. For the vast majority of retail investors who bought VCX, the real dawn has yet to arrive.

According to regulations, VCX shares purchased before February 20, 2026, are subject to a strict six-month lock-up period. Only a few investors who acquired a small number of shares through the Fundrise platform before the listing are exempt from this lock-up, though they are limited to purchasing no more than $10,000 worth of shares.

The biggest bubble in history?

No one wants to be the last buyer

The current batch consists of the fastest-growing companies in history.

The top three holdings of VCX—Anthropic, Databricks, and OpenAI—are all AI giants flourishing across the ocean:

Anthropic was founded in 2021, and its product Claude is currently one of the strongest agents. When it raised its Series A funding in 2021, it was valued at just $46.1 million, but after completing a $30 billion funding round last month, the company’s overall valuation has reached $380 billion;

Databricks is a big data AI company founded in 2013 and has gone through more than ten funding rounds since its inception, with the latest valuation around $134 billion;

OpenAI, a global AI leader, completed a $110 billion funding round in February this year, reaching a post-money valuation of $840 billion;

Additionally, VCX’s holdings also include Elon Musk’s commercial space company SpaceX and Anduril, known as the Tesla of the defense sector. All of these companies have significant valuations, with SpaceX aiming for a trillion-dollar valuation.

For this reason, these are also companies that are set to create the largest IPO in history.

Especially SpaceX, which plans to submit its prospectus soon, aiming for a June listing. Related parties expect this IPO to raise over $75 billion, with a target valuation of around $1.75 trillion. Similarly, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Databricks have all been reported to be planning IPOs this year.

For investors, just buying a share of VCX allows them to participate in the bell-ringing stories of a batch of top tech giants, and this expectation is indeed exhilarating.

However, it cannot be ignored that currently, VCX’s extraordinarily high premium is already overextending expectations.

At the time of VCX’s listing, its net asset value was about $19 per share, and based on its intraday peak price of $575, it translates to an astonishing premium of over 3000% compared to net asset value. This means that investors paid an astonishing premium of nearly $30 to buy $1 worth of underlying assets.

And whether the array of underlying assets held by VCX can achieve a rise of up to 30 times is still uncertain.

In the real world, signs of a bubble are already subtly emerging. On March 26, after gaining nearly 350% over the previous five trading days, VCX ended its continuous rise, with a drop of nearly 50%, followed by another plunge of 33% on March 27, closing at $173 per share.

(VCX stock price trend since listing)

“When such an exaggerated premium appears, the implied valuation of the underlying assets has completely detached from financial common sense, marking that the subject has completely devolved into a speculative and gambling frenzy for retail investors,” said Jack Shannon, head of equity strategy at Morningstar, bluntly.

Each generation has its own FOMO

This is a striking representation of FOMO today.

The underlying assets of VCX are anchored in the AI and space exploration sectors, which are currently the most consensus-driven endeavors in the world. Faced with the fear of missing out on the next era, fervent investors urgently need a super container to accommodate their FOMO.

It’s worth reflecting that each generation has its own FOMO.

Looking back to the new century, Amazon drove capital into a frenzy with the narrative that e-commerce would disrupt everything, with its stock price skyrocketing dozens of times in just two years. Fast forward to the next decade, Facebook, with its absolute monopoly on global social networking and money-printing capabilities, saw Wall Street’s top investment banks scrambling for internal allocations before its IPO.

And looking back ten years from today, Uber was still the most eye-catching unlisted unicorn globally, with its narrative being: transforming global human transportation. At that time, the world’s top VCs, sovereign wealth funds, and even crossover capital were all frantically competing for its shares, with its valuation skyrocketing from $10 billion to nearly $70 billion in a very short time.

Shifting focus back to China, there’s no shortage of collective memories around FOMO. For instance, in 2018, the pain points of the A-share market were steeped in the perfect miss of China’s internet golden decade, during which top internet giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD, and NetEase all listed in the US or Hong Kong.

At that time, to welcome the overseas-listed tech giants and the top domestic unicorns returning to A-shares, regulators specially approved the establishment of six strategic placement funds (commonly known as unicorn funds), with a very low subscription threshold, and a cap of up to 500,000 yuan for each person. Yet within just a few days, the unicorn funds had raised over hundreds of billions.

Labels on assets are always changing; every generation has its own madness, and every generation of capital has its own anxieties.

But there’s no need to ridicule; each time capital inflates a gigantic bubble with real money, these bubbles will eventually settle into the foundational reality of the next era.

After all, if the surface isn’t turbulent, how could there be real waves of an era?