The Anthropic frenzy is exposing a much bigger problem
Reports of a new Anthropic funding round are circulating, and the reaction has been hard to miss. Demand is reportedly north of $1T for a single private company, and within days, brokers and intermediaries across the market were claiming access to a piece of the action.
But here is the part nobody is talking about directly: most of that claimed access is not real, and the system built around it is designed to obscure that fact.
Private markets are redefining wealth creation
To understand why this matters, it helps to zoom out.
Over the past two decades, private markets have become the most significant wealth creation engine in modern finance. Global private market AUM has surpassed $13T, more than doubling over the past decade, with returns consistently outpacing public markets. U.S. private equity has generated annualized returns of approximately 15% over the last ten years, compared to roughly 10% for the S&P 500.
The more consequential shift, however, is structural. The U.S. has 50% fewer publicly listed companies than it did in the 1990s, and venture-backed companies are now taking a decade or more to reach an IPO. Amazon went public at $440MM. Google at $23B. Uber at $82B, with most of its value creation already complete by the time public market investors could participate.
The best companies are staying private longer, and the most significant returns are being captured before most investors ever get a chance to participate. The recent news with Anthropic and SpaceX illustrates this perfectly. Two very different companies, two very different timelines, and the same underlying dynamic: the most consequential value creation of our time is happening in private markets.
Retail investors are moving in
Retail investors are paying attention and acting on the opportunity. According to the McKinsey Global Private Markets Report 2026:
- 42% of RIAs in the U.S. expect more than 25% of their clients to be invested in private market alternatives by 2030
- U.S. retail capital flowing into alternative investments reached $204B in 2025, more than double the $92B recorded in 2023
In two years, retail participation has more than doubled. That is not a trend. It’s a structural shift in how everyday people are diversifying their portfolio and building their wealth.
“I have access” and why you should not believe it
Behind the headlines, the picture looks different.
When the Anthropic round hit the news cycle, inboxes and feeds filled up with brokers and intermediaries everywhere pushing the same message: “I have access. Reach out.” At face value, it all looked credible. It felt urgent. However, for the vast majority of retail investors, it’s not the reality.
The reality is that genuine, verified allocation to a round of this size and selectivity does not get mass distributed through broker networks and LinkedIn posts. Real access to top-tier private rounds is still overwhelmingly reserved for a small network of institutional investors, sovereign funds, and individuals with long-standing relationships with the company or its lead investors.
When that circle is full, what gets distributed to everyone else is the appearance of access, packaged and sold as if it were real. There’s no public registry of who holds legitimate allocation, and no way to verify whether the intermediary claiming to have “a piece” has a direct relationship with the company, a real allocation, a secondary position with no ownership trail, or nothing more than a claim stacked on another claim. That opacity is not incidental. It is the product.
Fees on fees: the hidden architecture of private market access
Even when access is technically real, the structure through which it is delivered is often designed to extract maximum value from the investor before a single dollar reaches the underlying company.
The dominant vehicle for distributing private market access to retail investors is the Special Purpose Vehicle, or SPV. In isolation, an SPV is a legitimate and useful structure. In practice, what has emerged in the retail private market space is a layered architecture that would be difficult to justify to any investor who understood what they were actually buying.
Here is how it typically works:
- An intermediary claims allocation in a private round
- Rather than passing that allocation directly to investors, they package it into an SPV and charge a management fee and carried interest
- That SPV is distributed through another intermediary, who creates their own SPV on top of the first, adding another layer of fees
- That second SPV may be sold through yet another broker or placement agent, who adds their own markup on top
By the time the investment reaches the retail investor, they may be sitting three or four layers removed from the underlying company, paying fees at every level of the stack, with no clear visibility into the total cost, the true ownership structure, or what they will actually receive if the company has a successful exit.
The incentive structure throughout this chain is fundamentally opaque and misaligned. The intermediaries at each layer collect their fees regardless of investment outcome. The management fees are charged on committed capital. The carry is taken on any upside. The investor absorbs the downside entirely. Since the structure is opaque by design, most investors do not fully understand the economics of what they own until it is too late.
Maybe I shouldn’t be pulling back the curtain on how the bread gets made, but honestly, the recipe is no secret. The bakery is charging retail investors for flour, yeast, the oven, the packaging, and the delivery, and handing them a loaf that may or may not exist.
SpaceX set the standard. Will anyone follow?
SpaceX took a different approach, reserving 30% of a recent funding round specifically for retail investors that’s structured, transparent, and on the company’s own terms. It proved that equitable, direct access is possible; however, without the infrastructure to make it repeatable and scalable, it remains the exception rather than the rule.
McKinsey estimates that only 16% of private market assets are currently accessible to individual investors, despite individuals representing over 50% of global investable assets.
The gap between those two numbers is where the fees live.
The infrastructure gap is where the fees live
For retail investors, private markets represent one of the most compelling wealth-building opportunities of our time. The demand is real and accelerating, but the infrastructure to meet it transparently, compliantly, and at scale is not.
Clean access requires transparency, a verified ownership chain from day one, and product governance that aligns incentives with investor outcomes. Platforms being built today to solve it, with transparency, compliance, and investor alignment at their core, will define who actually benefits from the next generation of private market wealth creation.