Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on the Coming Mega IPOs

The article frames 2026 as a potential year of mega IPOs as companies like Anthropic and SpaceX prepare to go public. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon also highlighted banking in the age of AI and argued that it is good for the U.S. to host the world's largest and most important companies. The piece is largely strategic and forward-looking, with limited immediate market-specific detail.

Analysis

The setup is most constructive for Goldman’s fee pool, but the second-order winner is really the public-market infrastructure that has been starved by the private-markets era. If the next wave of marquee listings actually clears, GS gets paid not just on underwriting but on the downstream financing, hedging, and M&A activity that tends to follow a successful debut cycle. The more important signal is regime change: a credible reopening of the IPO window should compress the valuation gap between late-stage private assets and listed comps, forcing VCs and sponsors to revisit exit timelines over the next 6-18 months.

The key loser is the closed-loop funding model that has let mega-cap private names stay off public exchanges while still scaling aggressively. If AI leaders and space/industrial platforms come public, expect pressure on late-stage private financing terms, secondary discounts, and employee liquidity structures as public marks become harder to ignore. That creates a reflexive benefit to exchange operators, market makers, and prime brokers even if the headline issuance volume is modest at first.

The contrarian risk is that "mega IPO" optimism can be a false dawn if rates, volatility, or post-listing performance disappoints. A weak first few deals would quickly push high-quality issuers back into private capital or dual-track processes, and the window could close for another 12-24 months. In that scenario, the near-term winner set shifts from banks to private-credit and structured-finance providers that can keep capital flowing without public-market execution risk.

For GS specifically, the market may be underestimating operating leverage: a handful of large transactions can move revenue meaningfully because incremental costs are low and the signal effect supports ECM, M&A, and trading franchises simultaneously. The asymmetry is better than it looks if the IPO pipeline becomes self-reinforcing; the risk is that consensus is already pricing in a cyclical rebound without enough evidence that private founders will actually tolerate public scrutiny.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long GS into any pullback over the next 1-3 months; upside comes from IPO/M&A operating leverage and franchise breadth, while downside is limited unless volatility re-prices sharply. Use a 6-12 month horizon and size for a 15-20% upside case versus low-teens downside if issuance disappoints.
• Pair trade: long GS / short a rate-sensitive private-market proxy basket if available, on the view that a reopening IPO cycle benefits fee generators more than capital providers. Best entry is on the first confirmation of a large filing or pricing window.
• Buy call spreads on GS with 6-9 month tenor to express optionality on a revived deal cycle; this is a cleaner way to play a multi-quarter issuance rebound than outright equity given event timing uncertainty.
• Watch for weakness in late-stage private-market secondaries and growth funds over the next 3-6 months; if mega IPOs start printing, those marks should compress as public comps become a credible alternative. Use as a signal to trim exposure to late-stage private valuations.
• If the IPO window opens, rotate toward exchange/market-structure beneficiaries on a relative basis rather than chasing each issuer individually; the higher-probability trade is on the plumbing, not the first-name hype.