The mega-IPO glut comes with a containment problem
Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing
It could be considered the absolute definition of a champagne problem. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley’s tech investment banking teams are so dominant that they won joint lead status on all three of the big “hyperscaler” IPO deals of 2026: SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI.
That is really quite a triumph, because usually companies are a bit reluctant to retain the same firm that’s advising on a similar deal in the same timeframe for one of their biggest competitors. And with the fees on SpaceX likely to have been into nine figures, and similar to come, it’s very economically material to all involved.
But, problems there are. Because the reason that companies are so reluctant to share advisers with their competitors is that they are, understandably, worried about information leakage and conflicts of interest. And because the bankers are worried about getting sued, as occasionally happens, they erect great big information-proof Chinese walls internally, to make sure that nobody slips up.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have had to create entirely separate deal teams, with no overlap of personnel between OpenAI and Anthropic, and not even any contribution from bankers who previously worked on SpaceX (where the conflict could come from any secondary sales planned once the lock-ups expire).
This shouldn’t really matter in booming markets. As long as the investor demand for anything tech-flavoured is limitless, then there’s nothing to be gained from the teams talking to one another. Their only real job is to execute the transaction and fend off the disappointed phone calls from people who didn’t get as many shares allocated as they wanted.
So as long as everything’s going completely brilliantly, there’s no need to worry about anything at all..
Aha.
Oooer.
Of course, Alphaville is aware that the greatest of all fallacies is to reason from a price change. But if we were to consider that one possible reason for the rapid re-entry from orbit of both the equity and bonds of SpaceX might be that investor demand for tech megacaps wasn’t limitless, that might cause some problems. Because it would mean that the finite demand had to be allocated across three different sources of supply — Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX secondary sales.
Normally that’s not such a big deal, because the way in which it gets sorted out is through open market competition — if the deals all had different advisers, then it would simply be a case of “may the best team win”. Whoever was best at persuading investors (and whichever issuer had the best underlying story) would get their deal away and take the bragging rights, while the losers would be left weeping into their beer.
But it’s much more difficult for that to happen in this situation. Because although GS and MS split their capital markets advisory teams up to prevent information leakage, they didn’t also decide to set up entirely separate equity sales forces and research departments. So despite the carefully maintained Chinese walls stopping information from one deal leaking to the advisers on another, the only piece of information that anyone actually needs to know right now — the amount of investor interest in the three different transactions — is coming from the exact same source.
Which creates something of a compliance minefield for the poor old infantry on the dealing floors. To avoid creating a conflict of interest, they need to treat all three internal teams with scrupulous fairness, making sure that everyone gets perfectly unbiased feedback on their own transactions, not giving any of the bankers a clue about what they might be saying to other teams and doing their best to avoid giving any impression to buy-side clients that they might be pushing one deal a little harder than the other.
It is no aspersion whatsoever on the fine men and women of the equity sales industry to say that this will place quite extraordinary demands on their tact and professionalism. Alphaville is confident that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs bankers and traders are up to the task — but it might be a good idea to delete WhatsApp from their phones for a while, to minimise the temptation to have the kind of friendly coffee catch-up that looks so much worse when it’s being discussed under subpoena.